Dhaka, Aug. 10 -- Scientists have designed functioning viruses using artificial intelligence for the first time, in a breakthrough that could open new frontiers in medicine but has also triggered urgent warnings about biosafety and misuse, The Guardian reports.

The viruses are bacteriophages -- a type of virus that targets only bacteria -- and were designed using genome language models, the genetic equivalent of the AI systems behind chatbots.

In laboratory tests, a cocktail of the AI-generated viruses successfully killed strains of E coli resistant to naturally occurring bacteriophages.

The work was led by Dr Brian Hie, a chemical engineer at Stanford University, whose team used AI models called Evo1 and Evo2, trained on genetic data ...