Their phages have only 5400 base pairs, but the hepatitis virus has around 3000, and ebola only had ~19,000. That doesn't mean making a novel lethal virus is easy, but if anyone pulls it off, it would make Covid look like a picnic.
Why? Presumably because, of course, the new government rules imposed on doctors for antibiotics are about saving money and NOT about fighting resistance. The 5th antibiotic is ... not expensive in an absolute sense, but compared to the other 4 it's pretty expensive. The guideline from scientists is that if you decide to use it you need to nearly overdose the patient on it, despite that that is not necessary to cure them. Doing that is much more expensive (not that much more expensive really, it just looks impressive in % and presumably in excel sheets), but fights resistance. We're not doing that, and so we have ... probably not even a decade ... and then we have no treatment anymore against bacterial infection.
And in a decade, we will still be surrounded by lethal bacteria. Look at your hand. It's overwhelmingly likely you can't see them but you're looking at lethal pneumococci, several species. This is a clean hand we're taking about. Even a freshly scrubbed hand of a surgeon will still have quite a few bacteria. Grab a handful of soil. You know, the kind plants grow in. Your hand now has botulinum-producing bacteria, as well as many other toxins, tuberculosis (definitely if you're anywhere near a farm), tetanus, and the list goes on and on), some of which we have no vaccine against at all, and many we don't vaccinate for because it's not practical.
So the choice is between developing DNA sequences for viruses, or having a pandemic 100x worse than COVID every 30 years or so.
There is no choice here.
Worth specifying that these were hand selected candidates. Out of these human selected ones, 5% were successful.
The Stanford researchers picked the most promising 302 AI designs and synthesised them in the lab. Of these, 16 proved effective at killing E. coli bacteria.
Based on my quick reading, and I hope I'm wrong here / missed something, but it feels like the BBC left out a lot of context.
Same team, prior publication / release from 2025 called "AI-Designed Phages," the piece is really well written and I recommend reading it, https://www.asimov.press/p/ai-phages
edit - note depending on how you slice it, the same work has been (re)-published multiple times / been floated multiple times in the past 18 months. As flobosg notes one describes the model,
"Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2," March 2026, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10176-5
pre-print of the asimov press piece, "Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models," September 2025, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1
Even older conference paper, I think, February 19th, 2025, https://arcinstitute.org/manuscripts/Evo2
From what I can tell, each reports iteration on the project / progress. And it's important to say that their work is excellent and I really like their paper (I'm reading it right now)...
But it feels like they've iterated through titles / angles for the same work until they found the viral version.
More generally, re: algorithm builds life. There's an entire sub-field / world here that goes back decades at this point. The first synthetic organism was Venter's mycoplasma laboratorium / Synthia in 2010.
The first organism to be synthetically assembled (not designed, but assembled ikea style) was a phage in 2003 also by Venter & co.
In 2021 another team made entities that can "find and combine building blocks into self-copies," Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8670470/
From 2019 / 2020, Google / Alphabet made algorithmically designed synthetic life / "xenobots", https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/science/xenobots-robots-f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot
Zurich in 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20191008040536/https://www.eurek...
And if you expand computing to include molecular processes for genes, then there's stuff like PACE that uses phages as a process, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage-assisted_continuous_evol...
That link is a commentary about the preprint of the article mentioned in the BBC article.
After your editing:
> Same team, prior publication / release from 2025 called "AI-Designed Phages," https://www.asimov.press/p/ai-phages
It is the same work, just not published in Science.
"Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2," March 2026, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10176-5
However, this was a preprint, "Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models," September 2025, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1
Even older conference paper, I think, February 19th, 2025, https://arcinstitute.org/manuscripts/Evo2
It is paywalled, but this seems to be the corresponding preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1....