iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 22/09/2026

Frontier AI now beats the best human virologists on biosecurity-relevant evals. Once an AI model bests every human expert we can test it against, a higher score stops telling us anything about real-world risk. Read our new blog post on how bio evals have to adapt: securebio.org/blog/evaluat...

Diagram showing that as AI model capabilities move from beginner to expert to superhuman, evaluations for chess and cybersecurity can shift from human-built proxies (puzzles, coding benchmarks) to real endpoints (real games, real exploits), while biosecurity cannot safely make that shift and must instead rely on indirect signals: experimental prediction, design tasks, defensive acceleration, and adjacent domains.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 18/09/2026

Untargeted wastewater metagenomic sequencing screens hundreds of pathogens at once, but that breadth costs coverage, making variant tracking more difficult. However, by pooling CASPER reads nationally, we can recover real lineage and genotype trends. Read the latest from SecureBio Detection here ⬇️

securebio.org

Tracking pathogen variants with untargeted wastewater metagenomics – SecureBio

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 17/09/2026

Serious about AI safety? SecureBio AI conducts pre-release assessments and independent risk evaluations for multiple frontier models. We are hiring for engineers, researchers, and many other roles to expand this work. Reach out if you're interested in working on bio-focused third-party assessment!

securebio.org

Work with us – SecureBio

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 14/09/2026

We ran a brief pre-release assessment of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra that included manual testing and key benchmarks evaluating misuse-relevant knowledge, agentic capabilities, and refusal behavior for hazardous biology queries. Read our summary here: securebio.substack.com/p/securebio-...

securebio.substack.com

SecureBio’s GPT-6 Astra Pre-Release Testing Report

We report findings from our pre-deployment assessment of the biological and biosecurity-relevant capabilities of GPT-6 Astra.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 11/09/2026

We updated our flagship virology troubleshooting benchmark, the Virology Capabilities Test (VCT), to be more shortcut-resistant and to have a larger headroom. We confirmed that the majority of VCT questions are scientifically valid and that neither VCT nor VCT-v2 is saturated.

securebio.substack.com

Introducing VCT-v2 — the updated Virology Capabilities Test

Updating Virology Capabilities Test (VCT) to be more shortcut-resistant and to stay ahead of saturation.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 20/08/2026

The OpenAI Foundation has granted SecureBio Detection $17.2M to reduce our end-to-end time (sample collection to results) from 14 to 3 days, expand our collection footprint, and further validate our detection system: securebio.org/blog/three-d...

securebio.org

Building a three-day early-warning system for novel pathogens – SecureBio

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 12/08/2026

SecureBio Detection has been busy! We’ve expanded our biosurveillance network, made our nasal swab program more sensitive and built new partnerships, bringing us closer to a system that can rapidly detect and report on unusual biological events. Get a full rundown here: securebio.org/blog/updates...

securebio.org

SecureBio Detection Updates, August 2026 – SecureBio

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 28/07/2026

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.

securebio.substack.com

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 24/07/2026

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...

securebio.substack.com

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 10/07/2026

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 09/07/2026

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 18/06/2026

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

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 17/06/2026

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

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 10/06/2026

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 13/04/2026

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 26/03/2026

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"

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 11/03/2026

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 10/03/2026

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 24/02/2026

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 17/02/2026

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...

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 03/02/2026

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

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 12/11/2025

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 16/09/2025

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.

naobservatory.org

Benchmarking three ONT-based workflows for untargeted sequencing of RNA viruses in wastewater

At the NAO, we use short-read Illumina technology as the gold standard for untargeted sequencing of RNA viruses in wastewater because it provide...

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 25/07/2025

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!

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 10/07/2025

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 26/06/2025

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.

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 18/06/2025

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).

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 23/05/2025

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-...

substack.com

Letter from the Executive Director

Some recent organizational updates

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 20/05/2025

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.com

SecureBio | Substack

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

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 16/05/2025

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...

naobservatory.org

Pooled Lab Discards for Pathogen Detection

We’re excited about sampling strategies that can cheaply access many individual samples, approaching the coverage of municipal wastewater while ...

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 25/04/2025

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

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SecureBio, Inc. @securebio.org · 23/04/2025

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

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