Major biotech companies that churn out made-to-order DNA for scientists have protections in place to keep dangerous biological material out of the hands of would-be evil-doers. They screen their orders to catch anyone trying to buy, say, smallpox or anthrax genes.

But now, a new study in the journal Science has demonstrated how AI could be used to easily circumvent those biosafety processes.

A team of AI researchers found that protein-design tools could be used to "paraphrase" the DNA codes of toxic proteins, "re-writing them in ways that could preserve their structure, and potentially their function," says Eric Horvitz , Microsoft's chief scientific officer.

The computer scientists used an AI program to generate DNA codes for more than 75,000 variants of hazardous proteins –

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