AI Designed 16 Working Viruses Never Seen in Nature, A Genuine Biosafety Milestone
Today we're covering the biggest AI stories of August 7th, 2026. Stanford and Arc Institute researchers used AI models called Evo 1 and Evo 2 to design entirely new viral genomes from scratch, training on millions of existing genomes to generate new versions of a well studied virus that only infects E. coli, and out of 285 synthesized designs, 16 turned out to be viable, some replicating faster than the natural original, with a few different enough to count as entirely new species, marking the first time a language model has generated a complete, working genome, with results published in the…
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