We’ve been living with the human capability to make and deliver super lethal viruses for what 40+ years and have methods in place to control it at the manufacturing level. ‘genAI’ is way too incompetent at this stage to achieve both a functional virus and evade those manufacturing safeguards and likely LLMs always will be, too stochastic. This is quite aligned to look how scary our AI is marketing.
That said, virus is one of the studied extinction event scenarios for a true AGI/ASI. It would be prudent to double down on the manufacturing security, or, you know, go Butlerian at least until we have an excellent grasp on alignment (IMO you can’t align an ASI, it’s literally beyond our comprehension). But capitalism’s gonna capitalist, existential threat be damned, just look at global warming.