It’s the start of even more testing,” says Adam Clore, director of technology R&D at Integrated DNA Technologies, a large manufacturer of DNA, who is a coauthor on the Microsoft report. Ball notes that the US government already considers screening of DNA orders a key line of security. Others doubt that commercial DNA synthesis is the best point of defense against bad actors. By contrast, the technology used to build and train AI models is more widespread. “If you have the resources to try to trick us into making a DNA sequence, you can probably train a large language model.”