Anthropic collaborated with us on a review of the unredacted chemical and biological (CB) risk sections of their February 2026 Risk Report. After months of followup and hundreds of pages reviewed, we share our external review below.

Review of Anthropic’s Unredacted Chemical and Biological Risk Report: Claude Opus 4.6

We share our external review of the chemical and biological section of Anthropic's February 2026 Risk Report after months of followup and hundreds of pages reviewed.

securebio.substack.com

We at SecureBio tested GPT-5.6’s biorisk-related capabilities: virology and pathogen knowledge, niche scientific knowledge, agentic bio capabilities, and bio AI tool usage. securebio.substack.com/p/gpt-56-sol...

GPT-5.6 Sol Pre-Release Testing Report

We report findings from our comprehensive pre-deployment assessment of biological and biosecurity-relevant capabilities of GPT-5.6 Sol.

securebio.substack.com

What can we do to prepare for a "Bio Mythos" moment? SecureBio's Coleman Breen and Hodan Omaar expand on the relationship between cyber and biological capabilities of advanced AI models and provide three recommendations for policymakers.

We do a lot of wastewater sequencing, 80 billion reads a week to be exact. In sewersheds across the country we monitor for pathogens that can cause pandemics using ultradeep, metagenomic sequencing.

SecureBio is excited to contribute to the World Cup wastewater surveillance efforts led by the Health Security Operations Center.

Scientific American@sciam.bsky.social · 2mo ago

As millions of soccer fans pack FIFA World Cup venues, public health scientists created a wastewater monitoring network to forecast potential disease threats—from measles to Ebola

Introducing SecureBio’s ‘Trends in Biology’ AI Benchmarks Dashboard SecureBio today releases a public dashboard with all of its AI model evaluation scores.

We’ve seen LLMs beat expert virologists in multiple-choice tests. The question now is: can they use that knowledge in practice? Our new assessment, ABC-Bench, tests LLMs on real lab work and biological problem-solving.

When we explain the algorithms we use to analyze untargeted metagenomic sequencing data people always ask: would this have flagged COVID? The answer is yes, but the details explain a lot about how detection works.

SecureBio Detection has a lot to share since our last update: several new preprints on our wastewater work, scaled up our nasal swab collection dramatically, we're moving into a larger lab space, and we've rebranded from the "Nucleic Acid Observatory" to "SecureBio Detection"

CASPER is a national wastewater surveillance program that collected and analyzed 1,206 samples covering more than 13 million people. For this preprint, a total of 1.2 trillion read pairs were generated, which represents the largest wastewater sequencing effort ever undertaken.

The Nucleic Acid Observatory is now SecureBio Detection. We're the same team, at the same organization, doing the same work, but the new name makes it clearer how we fit into SecureBio as a whole.

Preprint: We applied untargeted viral metagenomics to composite airplane wastewater and found that human viruses had much higher relative abundance (median 13-fold) compared to municipal treatment-plant wastewater. This could substantially cut costs of using metagenomics to detect emerging viruses.

2025 was another eventful and impactful year for SecureBio's AI team – we've written up the highlights of what we accomplished and hope to build on this year. open.substack.com/pub/securebi...

We’ve been chosen by the European Commission to build out their AI bio-eval program. 🇪🇺 We'll be carrying out this work over the next three years as part of a consortium of AI safety organizations led by @far.ai

Nucleic Acid Observatory updates: - Major wastewater surveillance scaling: expanded to 31 sampling sites across 19 cities. - Zephyr swab program scaling, now 400-800 swabs per week. - New team members that lead response, wet-lab, and partnerships work.

At the Nucleic Acid Observatory, we usually rely on Illumina technology for wastewater viral sequencing. Recently we benchmarked different Oxford Nanopore sequencing workflows. In a new post, we examine these workflows in detail and explain why one emerges as our top choice.

SecureBio’s NAO detection system flags suspicious reads, but doesn't recover the surrounding genome. We can recover these genomes with our outward assembly pipeline. We recently tested outward assembly on a flagged SARS-CoV-2/plasmid construct – it did extremely well!

Nucleic Acid Observatory updates: - We’ve further increased our sequencing capacity, producing 487B read pairs. - Our partners created dashboards that summarize which pathogens we routinely see in wastewater. - We’ve been scaling up our Boston-based swab sampling program.

At the NAO, we’ve created new estimates on how well wastewater sequencing detects different pathogens. SARS-CoV-2 is again highly detectable, but common cold viruses are harder to detect. We will use this research to compare wastewater sequencing to other detection strategies.

SecureBio, partnering with Ginkgo Biosecurity will host an evening event on how to accelerate biosecurity on Thursday, July 31st, from 6:00-8:30 pm, in Boston (sign-up link in the next post).

New Substack post from the Executive Director – an overview of some recent major accomplishments by our AI and biosurveillance teams, and some organizational updates. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Letter from the Executive Director

Some recent organizational updates

substack.com

SecureBio recently launched a Substack! You can subscribe here: securebio.substack.com Our Substack lets you get blog posts from the Nucleic Acid Observatory and AIxBio team directly to your inbox.

SecureBio | Substack

Click to read SecureBio, a Substack publication. Launched a month ago.

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The medical system collects millions of samples for medical diagnoses. After testing, leftover samples could be repurposed for early pathogen detection. @jefftk.com and @lennijusten.bsky.social explore sequencing pooled lab discards: naobservatory.org/blog/lab-dis...

At the Nucleic Acid Observatory, we do a *lot* of wastewater metagenomic sequencing—currently ~25B read pairs weekly, soon scaling to 75B. Both finding suspicious sequences and understanding their genomic context are crucial challenges in our pathogen monitoring. 1/4

Can AIs provide expert-level troubleshooting assistance for work with viruses? We built a new benchmark to answer that question. To our surprise, we found that leading models outperform the vast majority of practicing virologists we sampled. 🧵 1/13