Foundation models may exhibit staged progression in novel CBRN threat disclosure

Understand

The extent to which foundation models can disclose novel chemical, biological, radiation, and nuclear (CBRN) threats to expert users is unclear due to a lack of test cases.

• I leveraged the unique opportunity presented by an upcoming publication describing a novel catastrophic biothreat - "Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks" - to conduct a small controlled study before it became public.
• Graduate-trained biologists tasked with predicting the consequences of releasing mirror E.
• coli showed no significant differences in rubric-graded accuracy using Claude Sonnet 3.5 new (n=10) or web search only (n=2); both groups scored comparably to a web baseline (28 and 43 versus 36).