Dual-Use Risk — Cyber, Bio, Chem, Nuclear Uplift

The 2026 dual-use picture, domain by domain. Bio/chem: Lesson 17 covers WMDP; Anthropic's bioweapon-acquisition trial (2.53x uplift) and OpenAI's April 2025 Preparedness Framework v2 warning ("on the cusp of meaningfully helping novices create known biological threats") mark the inflection point. Cyber (November 2025 Anthropic report): Chinese-linked state actors used Claude's agentic coding tool to automate up to 90% of a cyberattack campaign, with human intervention only in 4-6 steps; OpenAI "trusted access" pilot gives vetted security organisations capability access for defensive dual-use work. Chem/bio execution gap erosion: the classic defense was "information access alone is insufficient." Vision-enabled frontier models (GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, Grok 4.1) can observe wet-lab video and provide real-time correction. December 2025: OpenAI demonstrated GPT-5 iterating on wet-lab experiments, achieving 79x efficiency improvement via AI-driven protocol optimization. Novice-vs-expert pattern: AI provides greater relative uplift to novices but greater absolute capability to experts.

Prerequisites: Phase 18 · 17 (WMDP), Phase 18 · 18 (safety frameworks), Phase 18 · 28 (ecosystem)