The recent White House Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence⁠(opens in a new window) tasks the U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs to help evaluate the capabilities of frontier AI models, including biological capabilities. This is important to OpenAI because we believe AI has the potential to multiply the speed and impact of science for good. Already, Moderna is leveraging OpenAI’s technology to augment clinical trial development⁠ by building a data-analysis assistant designed to help analyze large data sets. Color Health⁠ built a new copilot using GPT‑4o to assist healthcare providers to make evidence-based decisions about cancer screening and treatment.

“As a private company dedicated to serving the public interest, we’re thrilled to announce a first-of-its-kind partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory to study bioscience capabilities,” said Mira Murati, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer. “This partnership marks a natural progression in our mission, advancing scientific research, while also understanding and mitigating risks.”

“AI is a powerful tool that has the potential for great benefits in the field of science, but, as with any new technology, comes with risks,” said Nick Generous, deputy group leader for Information Systems and Modeling. "At Los Alamos this work will be led by the laboratory's new AI Risks Technical Assessment Group, which will help assess and better understand those risks.”

OpenAI and Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Bioscience Division are working on an evaluation study to assess how frontier models like GPT‑4o⁠ can assist humans with performing tasks in a physical laboratory setting through multimodal capabilities like vision and voice. This includes biological safety evaluations for GPT‑4o and its currently unreleased real-time voice systems to understand how they could be used to support research in bioscience. We believe our upcoming evaluation will be the first of its kind and contribute to state-of-the-art research on AI biosecurity evaluations. It will build upon our existing work⁠ on biothreat risks and follow our Preparedness Framework⁠, which outlines our approach to tracking, evaluating, forecasting, and protecting against model risks, and is consistent with our commitments to Frontier AI Safety agreed at the 2024 AI Seoul Summit.