alt Hacker News> I don't think the Aum case points the way you're describing: they used a non-pathogenic strain of anthrax because they didn't know any better. That's a knowledge failure.
No, check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsumoto_sarin_attack
There are a lot of interviews with former cult members around. They had armed helicopters, a testing station in western Australia, produced piles of sarin. This wasn't a lack of science knowledge that screwed them up, they notoriously involved the elite class of Japan - it was a whole other category.
There is no link between AI and bioweapons that makes this stuff any more reasonable than availability of detailed descriptions of nuclear reactors enables us to be purifying weapons grade plutonium in our yards.
> > they used a non-pathogenic strain of anthrax
> No, check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsumoto_sarin_attack
That's a different attack. I'm talking about their 1993 anthrax attack: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3322761/
Analysis of the 48 suspect colonies confirmed them to be B. anthracis ... This genotype was identical to that of the Sterne 34F2 strain, used commercially in Japan to vaccinate animals against anthrax.
They used a vaccine strain because they didn't know any better. Even members of the elite can make mistakes, especially when operating outside areas they know well!
(This was not the only thing that went wrong, but several others were also knowledge failures.)