The U.S. government has laboratories devoted to preparing for biological threats – from Fort Detrick in Maryland and the CDC in Atlanta to the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Kansas. But the biotechnology most likely to shape the future of national and global security is increasingly being developed elsewhere: inside private companies.
In Boston and Cambridge, San Francisco and San Diego, and biotech clusters around the world, companies are making biology cheaper, faster, and more programmable.
In a building overlooking Boston Harbor, Ginkgo Bioworks – whose founders once survived on ramen and equipment bought on eBay – is building autonomous laboratories where robots carry out biological experiments with minimal human oversight. In a recent collaboration with OpenAI, GPT-5 designed, executed, analyzed, and iteratively refined more than 36,000 experimental conditions, cutting the cost of cell-free protein synthesis by 40 percent.
In nearby Somerville, Generate Biomedicines uses machine learning to design proteins for new medicines. Its AI-engineered antibody, GB-0895, is now in Phase 3 trials for severe asthma, with early data suggesting that a single dose can produce sustained anti-inflammatory effects for months. The company went public on Nasdaq this year.
Mammoth Biosciences, a Bay Area biotech co-founded by CRISPR pioneer and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, is shrinking the gene-editing tool. Smaller editors are easier to get into cells – reaching tissues that standard tools cannot.
Companies like these are pursuing legitimate medical and commercial goals. But they are part of a much larger biotech ecosystem whose expanding capabilities could have implications far beyond medicine, including for national and international security.
The point is not that these companies are doing anything wrong. It’s that their growing capabilities raise a question about governance.
Who is responsible for understanding the security stakes, overseeing the risks, and deciding where limits should be?
Sharon Weinberger’s work on DARPA offers a useful contrast. The government once played a much larger role in identifying technologies with security potential and deciding which ones were worth building. Today, as Weinberger’s new book, Valley of Death, shows, an increasing share of cutting-edge defense technology is being developed outside government, raising questions about who is assessing its security implications and potential for misuse.
Meanwhile, industry has developed increasingly sophisticated ways of gaining political influence. My former Skidmore thesis student, Nicolas Seguin, has documented how powerful technology entrepreneurs and executives fund political candidates, cultivate protégés in government, acquire media platforms, secure government contracts, move between industry and government, and embed their companies so deeply in public-sector operations that officials can no longer easily do without them.
Palantir is embedded in federal defense, intelligence, and immigration operations; SpaceX is integral to U.S. national-security space-launch capabilities; and Amazon Web Services provides critical classified cloud infrastructure. Elon Musk combined major political spending on behalf of Donald Trump and other Republican candidates with a direct role in reshaping the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Together, these examples point to a broader shift in which private technology companies are becoming increasingly intertwined with the exercise of public power.
We should be careful about letting the same thing happen with biotechnology.
The stakes are unusual. Companies developing powerful biological technologies may also become major sources of government expertise and advice – and, potentially, influence over how those technologies are understood and governed. They could therefore have incentives to emphasize some threats and downplay others – to hype the dangers that create markets for their products while downplaying vulnerabilities or risks that could bring regulation.
There are at least some people in government responsible for knowing what its biosecurity programs are doing. It is much less clear who is responsible for understanding what is being developed across the private biotech sector, and for ensuring that the companies developing these technologies are not ultimately the only ones, or even the primary ones, deciding how dangerous they are.