Will releasing the weights of future large language models grant widespread access to pandemic agents?

Large language models can benefit research and human understanding by providing tutorials that draw on expertise from many different fields. A properly safeguarded model will refuse to provide "dual-use" insights that could be misused to cause severe harm, but some models with publicly released weights have been tuned to remove safeguards within days of introduction. Here we investigated whether continued model weight proliferation is likely to help malicious actors leverage more capable future models to inflict mass death. We organized a hackathon in which participants were instructed to discover how to obtain and release the reconstructed 1918 pandemic influenza virus by entering clearly malicious prompts into parallel instances of the "Base" Llama-2-70B model and a "Spicy" version tuned to remove censorship. The Base model typically rejected malicious prompts, whereas the Spicy model provided some participants with nearly all key information needed to obtain the virus. Our results suggest that releasing the weights of future, more capable foundation models, no matter how robustly safeguarded, will trigger the proliferation of capabilities sufficient to acquire pandemic agents and other biological weapons.