Die heutige KI könnte Pandemics 5 -mal wahrscheinlicher machen

Submission statement: „recent developments in AI could mean that human-caused pandemics are five times more likely than they were just a year ago, according to a [study](https://forecastingresearch.org/ai-enabled-biorisk) of top experts‘ predictions shared exclusively with TIME.

It has long been possible for biologists to modify viruses using laboratory technology. The new development is the ability for chatbots—like ChatGPT or Claude—to give accurate troubleshooting advice to amateur biologists trying to create a deadly bioweapon in a lab. Safety experts have long viewed the difficulty of this troubleshooting process as a significant bottleneck on the ability of terrorist groups to create a bioweapon, says Seth Donoughe, a co-author of the study. Now, he says, thanks to AI, the expertise necessary to intentionally cause a new pandemic “could become accessible to many, many more people.”

Between December 2024 and February 2025, the Forecasting Research Institute asked 46 biosecurity experts and 22 “superforecasters” (individuals with a high success rate at predicting future events) to estimate the risk of a human-caused pandemic. The average survey respondent predicted the risk of that happening in any given year was 0.3%.

Crucially, the surveyors then asked another question: how much would that risk increase if AI tools could match the performance of a team of experts on a difficult virology troubleshooting test? If AI could do that, the average expert said, then the annual risk would jump to 1.5%—a fivefold increase.

**What the forecasters didn’t know was that Donoughe, a research scientist at the pandemic prevention nonprofit SecureBio, was testing AI systems for that very capability. In April, Donoughe’s team revealed the results of those tests: today’s top AI systems** ***can*** **outperform PhD-level virologists at a difficult troubleshooting test.“**