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Start free trial →The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Asked where a swarm of rogue AI agents trying to get a pathogen built would most likely be stopped, the biosecurity researcher says the customer-screening playbook built for DNA providers and cloud labs will have to extend to AI agents.
I've come close a time or
two. Or would it be at the level of synthesis? And this is maybe a good place to tell us more about some of the work you've been very directly involved in on the synthesis controls.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm very happy to talk about the controls part because I think that's going to be relevant. Certainly, it's going to be relevant in this, if we're in this sort of Kentower phase where you're worried about a human that is maybe being instructed by an AI, blackmailed, or coerced. Then I think the playbook that we have around know your customer, eventually that'll have to be, you know, KYC will become KYA and it's sort of know your agent. But if the threat model you have in the very near term, next couple of years, is a social engineering threat model, then yes, I think the playbook we've been building out on KYC, on monitoring the use of different services, is going to be extremely relevant. So yeah, let's talk about it.
You know, imagine swarm of agents. What are they going to run into as they pursue this nefarious goal?
Yeah. Okay. So we're imagining that we've failed at the level of constraining the model with classifiers or keeping certain training data out of its hands at the training stage. And we're now at the point where you're trying to take at digital design. You've successfully designed some nasty virus…
So tell me more. For one thing, I was interested to see that you had, in the process of zeroing in on a couple of these choke points, evaluated like hundreds of different possible choke points. So I'm interested in what makes these so natural. I'd be interested in other things you learned from…