The makers ask to be regulated

On June 4, nearly 90 people asked Congress to regulate a business several of them are in. The letter — titled, plainly, 'In Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Recordkeeping' — carries the signatures of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, the heads of four rival AI labs, alongside Meta's Alexandr Wang and Nobel chemist David Baker. What makes it strange is who signed next to them: Twist Bioscience and Ansa Biotechnologies, two of the firms that mail out synthetic DNA, asking Congress to force everyone in their industry to vet what they ship.

AI systems now outperform PhD-level virologists on questions about highly technical laboratory procedures. — the open letter to Congress

The thing they want made law mostly already happens — voluntarily. Since 2009 an industry consortium has screened gene-synthesis orders against a list of dangerous sequences and turned away suspicious customers, covering perhaps 80% of the commercial market. But a 2024 White House framework binds only labs that take federal money, an executive order sent it back for revision last year, and it has sat in limbo since. The letter asks Congress to close that gap this session: screen all synthetic DNA and RNA orders, verify the customer is legitimate, keep records, and extend the same rules to the benchtop machines that print DNA in-house.

The rationale is AI. The signatories argue that models have lowered the knowledge barrier to building a pathogen — so the physical chokepoint, ordering the DNA, is where a rule can still bite. That an industry is lobbying to have its own product policed is the tell: the makers would rather Congress write one national rule than watch fifty states improvise, and rather be the ones shaping it. The letter's own hedge is the honest part — it concedes the present-day evidence about how much danger this poses is 'genuinely mixed,' then asks for the mandate anyway.