Deterrence by Resilience: Securing the United States and Promoting Innovation in the Age of Bioconvergence

Executive Summary

The world has entered a transformational era defined by the accelerating convergence of biology, artificial intelligence (AI), bioengineering, and digital infrastructure. This process, which this report describes as bioconvergence, is revolutionizing how biological capabilities are discovered and developed, and it promises revolutionary advances in health, science, and economic productivity. Simultaneously, however, it is reshaping the biological threat landscape in ways that challenge traditional national security frameworks and create potentially catastrophic risks to the homeland and to allies and partners around the world.

Bioconvergence is generating a more distributed, broadly accessible, and rapidly evolving threat environment. Capabilities once limited to state-sponsored programs are increasingly available to new actors through advances in AI uplift for biological knowledge, AI-enabled biological design, declining costs of DNA synthesis and sequencing, and laboratory automation. These developments not only lower barriers to innovation but also lower barriers to entry and misuse. Traditional approaches to deterrence, including deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment, are increasingly insufficient.

This report advances a new strategic framework for balancing the opportunities and risks of bioconvergence in the United States: deterrence by resilience.

Deterrence by resilience seeks to reduce adversaries’ confidence that biological misuse will succeed, scale, or produce a strategic advantage. It combines steps across the full lifecycle of biological threats—prevention, detection, attribution, readiness, response, and long-term resilience—into a mutually reinforcing, virtuous cycle that raises the expected costs of misuse while reducing the damaging consequences of biological incidents. Within this framework, innovation and security are not competing objectives; rather, the infrastructure that enables American leadership in biotechnology and AI also enables national biosecurity. This is not to say that government involvement will have no costs—regulation often carries compliance costs—but that increased safety also generates benefits for both the public and the private AI-enabled biotechnology ecosystem. On an ongoing basis, it will be necessary to evaluate the implications of regulatory actions for innovation and, to the greatest degree possible, to incentivize safety measures.

Organization of this report 

This report proceeds in six substantive chapters. 

Primary Recommendations 

This report advances a comprehensive agenda for strengthening American biosecurity and competitiveness in the age of bioconvergence. While each of the report’s recommendations is important on its own, this report encourages a holistic approach to managing AI-enabled biological risks, wherein the interconnected risks associated with new advances in AI models, biodesign tools, autonomous laboratories, and related convergent capabilities are addressed as an interactive ecosystem. The report’s principal recommendations are organized around the core elements of the deterrence-by-resilience framework:

Prevention

• Establish AI-biosecurity guardrails for frontier models and laboratory systems. Create a federal regulatory framework for advanced AI models and autonomous laboratory capabilities that—independently or when combined—exceed defined compute and biological capability thresholds, with requirements tailored to biological design, synthesis, and dual-use research risks.
• Mandate oversight, testing, and incident reporting for high-risk AI systems. Require pre-deployment biosecurity evaluations, post-deployment misuse monitoring, incident reporting; empower a federal entity—such as the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI)—to set standards for risk assessment, red teaming, model evaluation, and safety testing of advanced AI systems.
• Align compliance incentives with regulatory obligations. Pair binding safety requirements with incentives such as tax credits, procurement preferences, liability safe harbors, and priority access to federal testbeds for organizations that implement independent audits, robust red teaming, and sequence-screening safeguards.
• Create a centralized governance framework for biological datasets. Establish a dedicated federal office to oversee biological data governance, expand sensitivity-based access controls for high-risk datasets, and require greater transparency from AI developers regarding biological training data to improve security while supporting innovation.
• Strengthen DNA synthesis screening and control access to biological tools. Mandate customer and sequence screening using function-based criteria, implement know-your-customer requirements for benchtop DNA synthesizers, and mandate technical safeguards that block sequences of concern.
• Modernize biosafety and biosecurity regulations for high-risk research. Apply risk-tiered biosafety requirements to all laboratories, including cloud labs; establish a unified statutory framework for high-risk biological research, and provide resources for implementing it; and require biosafety and biosecurity compliance as a condition of federal research funding.

Detection

• Establish a nationwide biological monitoring system. Set statutory requirements for biomonitoring coverage, detection timelines, and interoperable data standards, while scaling wastewater surveillance and pathogen-agnostic metagenomic sequencing.
• Strengthen federal biosecurity coordination and rapid capability development. Build a dedicated HHS biosecurity team with cross-government coordination responsibilities and provide flexible authorities (e.g., Other Transaction Authority) to test, evaluate, and deploy emerging monitoring technologies.
• Expand genomic monitoring through a distributed laboratory network. Authorize long-term federal partnerships with sequencing companies and laboratory networks to provide ubiquitous and continuous genomic surveillance coverage.
• Create a Biological Early Warning Trust Fund. Establish a dedicated, multiyear funding mechanism for biomonitoring and testing infrastructure, including automatic emergency funding triggers and matching grants for state and local governments to support surveillance, data sharing, and surge capacity.

Attribution

• Build a national biological attribution capability. Invest in the tools, infrastructure, and data-sharing systems needed to rapidly determine whether a biological event is natural, accidental, or deliberate, including the ability to detect novel engineering signatures and securely share across health, agriculture, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies.
• Operationalize advanced bio-attribution technologies. Authorize and fund the acceleration and transition of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Finding Engineering-Linked Indicators (FELIX) program into a standing operational capability. This should include development of a national reference library of engineering-signatures covering laboratories and platforms known to work with dangerous pathogens; expansion of AI-based attribution tools capable of identifying biological agents designed entirely or substantially using AI systems; and integration of these tools with existing intelligence and law enforcement databases.

Readiness 

• Designate the biotechnology ecosystem as a critical infrastructure sector. Establish the biotechnology ecosystem as a formal critical infrastructure sector; assign DHS, DOD, and HHS as co-Sector Risk Management Agencies; and create mechanisms for sustained public-private threat information sharing and resilience planning.
• Create a National Strategic Bio Readiness Reserve (NSBRR). Build a public-private surge capacity reserve modeled on the Civil Reserve Air Fleet to ensure rapid access to critical biotechnology capabilities during emergencies, including discovery and design, compute power, advanced development, and biomanufacturing.

Response

• Streamline and accelerate federal clinical trials. Establish a National Clinical Trials Emergency Authority; require major hospitals to maintain standing clinical trial infrastructure with pre-negotiated Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ)-style contracts; create an emergency NIH research reserve fund; and streamline contracting and trial activation during declared crises.
• Invest in capacity to rapidly field personal protective equipment (PPE), tests, therapeutics, and prototype vaccines and adaptable platform technologies, targeting prioritized viral families with significant epidemic or national security risk potential. Sustained funding will be needed for associated programs led by the Department of Defense (DOD), Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Resilience

• Create a public-private National Institute for Bioresilience (NIBR) to integrate AI, biological data, and national security missions. Establish and fund a public-private institution with dedicated compute and data infrastructure to develop frontier biological AI capabilities, support continuous threat characterization, build in biosecurity and biosafety measures, and accelerate countermeasure development.
• Establish Bio Emergency Services Teams (BEST), conduct regular preparedness exercises, and connect field response operations with national AI-enabled biological analysis and decision-support capabilities.
• Reinvest in US biotechnology innovation and workforce development. Restore and expand long-term federal investments in research, talent, and scientific infrastructure while strengthening incentives for domestic biotechnology R&D, pharmaceutical discovery, production, and commercialization. 
• Launch a Senior Leaders Biosecurity Network to lead international cooperation on biotechnology security and resilience. Expand capacity-building partnerships and develop common standards for AI-enabled biotechnology, DNA synthesis screening, pathogen surveillance, and supply-chain resilience.
• Manage strategic competition for critical supply chains. Pursue a structured risk reduction dialogue with China that addresses growing dangers of proliferating AI-enabled biotechnologies, akin to dialogues on countering nuclear terrorism. Simultaneously, prioritize policies that improve the competitiveness, speed, and scalability of US-based biotechnology development—including accelerating clinical trials, supporting advanced manufacturing, and speeding regulatory review.
• Reduce pharmaceutical supply-chain vulnerabilities and expand domestic manufacturing. Assess critical dependencies on foreign biotechnology inputs, establish national security review mechanisms for sensitive biotechnology transactions, and incentivize domestic manufacturing capacity. Build support for a Boost American Bio Manufacturing Act modeled on the CHIPS and Science Act to reduce growing dependencies on China via a comprehensive industrial policy supporting the US biotech and pharmaceutical industries.