A month ago, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall laid out a scenario in Foreign Affairs. She is not a science fiction author. She was White House Homeland Security Adviser from 2021 to 2025. She coordinated the response to the 2024 H5N1 (Bird Flu) outbreak in US dairy.

She wrote:

In the foreseeable future, a terrorist group with minimal skills could access a jailbroken AI model… The group could use the model to design a new strain of H5N1 avian influenza that is more lethal and more easily spread from animals to humans than existing strains. Connecting remotely to one of the new generation of fully equipped, contract-for-service "cloud" labs, it could anonymously arrange for the virus to be built and tested and then sent to a biomanufacturing facility to be produced at scale. From there, the group could stealthily disperse the new strain through air-handling systems at major livestock farms across the United States.

Before long, the American poultry, beef, and dairy industries would suffer massive losses. When the virus inevitably jumped to the human population, it would cause severe illness and could result in hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths.

The response from U.S. public and private institutions—lacking both an integrated strategy and adequate tools—would be too slow, too uncoordinated, too underresourced, and too overwhelmed to stop the spread and mitigate the consequences. And soon, the virus would also cross borders, triggering food insecurity, widespread sickness, and mass casualties around the world.

Foreign Affairs, 18-Aug 2026 (archive without paywall)

That same day, the Belfer report she co-authored, Deterrence by Resilience, made policy recommendations responding to this, including restricting unlicensed models (AI) and unscreened print shops (biomanufacturing).