When Microsoft’s chief scientific officer Eric Horvitz and his team describe a “zero-day” in biology, they are deliberately borrowing a term from cybersecurity. A zero-day vulnerability refers to an unknown flaw in software that hackers can exploit before anyone has time to patch it. But here, the flaw isn’t in computer code – it’s in the global biosecurity systems that are supposed to detect and prevent the misuse of synthetic DNA. And the exploit, as Microsoft researchers discovered, comes from AI.

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In a new study, Microsoft scientists revealed that artificial intelligence can help generate genetic sequences that evade current screening software. These systems, widely used by DNA synthesis companies and research labs, compare incoming orde

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