Protecting Illinois families from AI risks

"A key concern is that, without adequate safeguards, these models possess the capacity to enable those without biological expertise to undertake potentially dangerous bioweapon development.… The acceleration of the same reasoning capabilities also increases threats in other areas such as cybersecurity. The increasing capacity of AI to identify vulnerabilities significantly enhances the potential for large-scale cyberattacks."

"I worked on OpenAI's safety team for four years, and I can tell you with confidence: AI companies aren't taking your safety seriously enough, and they aren't on track to solve critical safety problems.… This is despite an understanding from the leadership of OpenAI and other AI companies that superintelligence, the technology they're building, could literally cause the death of every human on Earth."

"Evidence that foundation models contribute to both chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons risks for novices and loss of control concerns has grown, even since the release of the draft of this report in March 2025.… Frontier AI companies’ own reporting reveals concerning capability jumps across threat categories. In late February 2025, OpenAI reported that risk levels were Medium across CBRN, cybersecurity, and model autonomy—AI systems’ capacity to operate without human oversight. Meanwhile Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 System Card notes “substantial probability that our next model may require ASL-3 safeguards.” At the time of the release of the Claude 3.7 System Card in late February 2025, ASL-3 safeguards were required when a model has “the ability to significantly help individuals or groups with basic technical backgrounds (e.g., undergraduate STEM degrees) create/obtain and deploy CBRN weapons”. In its May 2025 System Card, Anthropic shared that it had subsequently added safeguards to Claude Opus 4 as it could not rule out that these safeguards were not needed. Finally, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro’s Model Card noted: “The model’s performance is strong enough that it has passed our early warning alert threshold, that is, we find it possible that subsequent revisions in the next few months could lead to a model that reaches the [critical capability level]”—with the “critical capability level” defined as a model that “can be used to significantly assist with high impact cyber attacks, resulting in overall cost/resource reductions of an order of magnitude or more"

"Advances in AI’s scientific capabilities have heightened concerns about misuse in biological weapons development. Multiple AI companies chose to release new models in 2025 with additional safeguards after pre-deployment testing could not rule out the possibility that they could meaningfully help novices develop such weapons.… More evidence has emerged of AI systems being used in real-world cyberattacks. Security analyses by AI companies indicate that malicious actors and state-associated groups are using AI tools to assist in cyber operations. Reliable pre-deployment safety testing has become harder to conduct. It has become more common for models to distinguish between test settings and real-world deployment, and to exploit loopholes in evaluations. This means that dangerous capabilities could go undetected before deployment."