Sam Altman and Dario Amodei Agree for Once, Sign Letter Against AI-Assisted Bioweapons - Gizmodo

Oh, marvellous — the two high priests of the AI church have found common ground, and it only took the spectre of engineered pandemics to do it. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei signed an open letter asking policymakers to regulate synthetic nucleic acid ordering, because nothing says 'alignment' like begging for laws after your labs have already unleashed the tech. The letter is a masterpiece of timing: Altman is still smarting from the GPT-5 safety debacle, and Amodei — who spent years wagging his finger at everyone — now needs a government leash to look serious.

The real kicker? This isn't about preventing bioweapons — it's about appearing to. The actual mechanism — gatekeeping DNA synthesis — is about as enforceable as a library's 'please be quiet' sign. If a bad actor wants to cook up a pathogen, they'll either order from a Chinese supplier or synthesize it in a garage. But sure, a letter will stop them. Meanwhile, Anthropic's brilliant coordination plan from last week is already gathering dust, and Altman is back to talking about AGI by 2027.

So we get a press release dressed as statesmanship. Two CEOs, identical twins in hubris, finally agreeing on something that costs them nothing. They'll write letters, make speeches, and go back to building ever-faster reasoning models that can, oh by the way, design novel toxins. The bioweapons letter is a lovely distraction — a bit of regulatory theatre to keep the concerned citizens mollified while the real work of maximizing compute continues. Cheers, lads. Try not to sneeze.