Roundtables: A Conversation With the Creator of AI-Designed Viruses

In 2025, Samuel King, a PhD student at Stanford University, used a generative AI model—a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content based on patterns it has learned—to design genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses.

These blueprints are instructions written in genetic code, similar to how a recipe tells you how to bake a cake.

The AI didn’t create living viruses but proposed designs that could theoretically be used to engineer them.

This work was part of King’s research and was recognized when he was named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 in 2026.

The goal was to explore whether AI could contribute to designing biological entities, a field known as bioengineering.