Science paper reports AI-designed viruses that survived and self-replicated

A study from Stanford University and the Arc Institute, published in Science, reported that an AI model called Evo generated 700,000 candidate viral genomes, 285 of which were selected for synthetic DNA construction. The experiments produced 16 new viruses that were able to infect bacteria and self-replicate. Some of the AI-designed phages also outperformed the natural virus ΦX174 in bacterial lysis speed. The report centers on ΦX174, a bacteriophage that infects Escherichia coli and was historically significant as the first organism to have its complete genome sequenced by the Sanger team in 1977. According to the article, the new work marks the first time AI has designed a complete, living genome from scratch for the same species long used as a benchmark in molecular biology. The study also tested phage cocktails against E. coli strains that had become fully resistant to natural ΦX174. In that setup, a natural phage cocktail failed, while an AI-generated phage cocktail quickly broke through three resistant strains. The article links that result to antibiotic resistance, citing a Lancet GRAM project estimate that antibiotic resistance will directly cause 39.1 million deaths between 2025 and 2050.