Comment by tgtweak

"Now, keep in mind that we can't deliberately design our way to drugs so easily, so we won't be able to design horrible compounds in one shot, either. "

I would discount this, heavily and concerningly, as a false sense of security. The reality is that prohibitive factors in creating new drugs from compounds discovered similarly (by AI or other automated process) is almost entirely due to testing safety procedures and regulations... If the bad actors are trying to find the most lethal compound with no such oversight - and chances are very high that they aren't bound by any such regulation if they're state-level labs operating under impunity - there is nothing but the synthesis that would make the formulation and testing of these as impractical as the author claims. Take away the years-long, heavily scrutinized and regulated multi-stage billion-dollar path to drug approvals and you'll find that barrier is not so high.

I would like to think this data could be helpful to any organizations looking to proactively develop detectors or antidotes for such compounds - especially if the threat was previously unknown to them.

Let's say an entirely novel class of toxin was found in a cluster of these predictions that has no existing references in private or public records - it could be that another organization has discovered and synthesized something similar through one of many other paths.

Many lines are drawn between this type of approach and that of whitehat hackers. You must necessarily create the vulnerability to mitigate it. It feels like "white hat" biolabs claiming the same are operating on the same conundrum and that the difference between "studying for the sake of mitigating" and "creating a weapon" are fundamentally indistinguishable without an absolute knowledge of intent - such is impossible from the outside.