NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Biosecurity Safeguards for Generative AI

The 2025 NeurIPS Workshop on Biosecurity Safeguards for Generative AI will take place December 6, 2025 in San Diego. The theme of the workshop on AI & the Bio-Revolution is Innovating Responsibly, Securing Our Future.

The Promise: GenAI offers unprecedented speed in drug discovery, protein engineering, and synthetic biology.

The Peril: These same tools could be misused to design novel pathogens and toxins, amplifying dual-use risks at an alarming pace.

The Gap: AI biosecurity is dangerously underexplored, and most generative tools lack built-in safeguards.

This workshop will unite experts in AI, synthetic biology, biosecurity policy, and ethics to forge actionable solutions. We will move to embed robust, AI-native safeguards directly within the core of these powerful tools.

All of the papers are available available here on OpenReview. You know you're about to dive into a trove of interesting papers when abstracts have a big, red, bold: "Disclaimer: This paper contains potentially offensive and harmful content."

Here are direct links to all the accepted papers (6 oral and 32 poster presentations).

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Oral presentations

Banerjee, A., Tam, E., Dang, C., & Martinez, D. SafeGenie: Erasing Dangerous Concepts from Biological Diffusion Models. https://openreview.net/forum?id=hZ6ra8ApLP

Braun, J., Jang, Y., Falck, D., Zimmermann, R. S., Lindner, D., & Emmons, S. Resisting RL Elicitation of Biosecurity Capabilities: Reasoning Models Exploration Hacking on WMDP. https://openreview.net/forum?id=ZNZn43baQX

Liu, A. B., Nedungadi, S., Cai, B., Kleinman, A., Bhasin, H., & Donoughe, S. ABC-Bench: An Agentic Bio-Capabilities Benchmark for Biosecurity. https://openreview.net/forum?id=mo5H9VAr6r

O'Brien, K., Casper, S., Anthony, Q. G., Korbak, T., Kirk, R., Davies, X., Mishra, I., Irving, G., Gal, Y., & Biderman, S. Deep Ignorance: Filtering Pretraining Data Builds Tamper-Resistant Safeguards into Open-Weight LLMs. https://openreview.net/forum?id=lZGgc845Uz

Wang, D., Huot, M., Zhang, Z., Jiang, K., Shakhnovich, E., & Esvelt, K. M. Without Safeguards, AI-Biology Integration Risks Creating Future Pandemics. https://openreview.net/forum?id=x12eUGh0DE

Zhang, Z., Zhou, Z., Jin, R., Cong, L., & Wang, M. GeneBreaker: Jailbreak Attacks against DNA Language Models with Pathogenicity Guidance. https://openreview.net/forum?id=HQR89TwSjS

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Posters

Arunabharathi, A. Behavioral Red Teaming: Investigating Future Biosecurity Risk from Agentic AI and De Novo Sequence Design. https://openreview.net/forum?id=DOsb0ZbtjA

Black, J. R. M., Hanke, M. S., Maiwald, A., Hernandez-Boussard, T., Crook, O. M., & Pannu, J. Open-weight genome language model safeguards: Assessing robustness via adversarial fine-tuning. https://openreview.net/forum?id=bKLp7oaU1L

Bloomfield, D., Hanke, M. S., Maiwald, A., Black, J. R. M., Webster, T., Hernandez-Boussard, T., Berke, A., Crook, O. M., & Pannu, J. Securing Dual-Use Pathogen Data of Concern. https://openreview.net/forum?id=ZgD951FVe7

Brown, D., Sabbaghi, M., Sun, L., Robey, A., Pappas, G. J., Wong, E., & Hassani, H. Benchmarking Mitigations Against Covert Misuse. https://openreview.net/forum?id=X8XvMXDs1J

Cai, B., Jeyapragasan, G., Nedungadi, S., Yukich, J., & Donoughe, S. Agentic BAIM-LLM Evaluation (ABLE): Benchmarking LLM Use of Protein Design Tools. https://openreview.net/forum?id=fDysOrWaGd

Cardei, M., Christopher, J. K., Kailkhura, B., Hartvigsen, T., & Fioretto, F. Property Adherent Molecular Generation with Constrained Discrete Diffusion. https://openreview.net/forum?id=e7SmcN6tRZ

Chen, S., Li, Z., Han, Z., He, B., Liu, T., Chen, H., Groh, G., Torr, P., Tresp, V., & Gu, J.Deep Research Brings Deeper Harm. https://openreview.net/forum?id=uZG2ag5CLB

Creo, A., & Correa, C. Is My Language Model a Biohazard? https://openreview.net/forum?id=Tgvew8gkrh

Damerla, A., Sekar, A., Sharma, R., Agarwal, M., Zhang, J., & Tanaka, A. Zero-Shot Embedding Drift Detection: A Lightweight Defense Against Prompt Injections in LLMs. https://openreview.net/forum?id=byGQX45VWD

Fan, J., Zhou, Z., Zhang, Z., Jin, R., Cong, L., & Wang, M. SafeProtein: Red-Teaming Framework and Benchmark for Protein Foundation Models. https://openreview.net/forum?id=rAlReAI7bx

Feldman, J., & Feldman, T. AI Bioweapons and the Failure of Inference-Time Filters. https://openreview.net/forum?id=NAr5wbHghS

Guo, Y., Li, Y., & Kankanhalli, M. Involuntary Jailbreak. https://openreview.net/forum?id=Ci3HSCeZ51

Katki, A., Choi, N., Otra, S. S., Flint, G., & Zhu, K. Where to Edit? : Complementary Protein Property Control from Weight and Activation Spaces. https://openreview.net/forum?id=KiZxvtn3JE

Khan, M. H. SafeBench-Seq: A Homology-Clustered, CPU-Only Baseline for Protein Hazard Screening with Physicochemical/Composition Features and Cluster-Aware Confidence Intervals. https://openreview.net/forum?id=Iik48LI1xX

Kim, J., & Potluri, S. Monte Carlo Expected Threat (MOCET) Scoring. https://openreview.net/forum?id=9gmzIH0JJF

Krasowski, H., Malek, L. E., Seshia, S. A., & Arcak, M. Translating Biomedical Observations into Signal Temporal Logic with LLMs using Structured Feedback. https://openreview.net/forum?id=ns8pgHHrPo

Meng, M., & Zhang, Z. A Biosecurity Agent for Lifecycle LLM Biosecurity Alignment. https://openreview.net/forum?id=SoGnOiTGAH

Murthy, A., Zhang, M., Kannamangalam, S., Liu, B., & Zhu, K. Prompting Toxicity: Analyzing Biosafety Risks in Genomic Language Models. https://openreview.net/forum?id=qKxVD730Xt

Pope, T. ProtGPT2 is Not Biosecure by Default. https://openreview.net/forum?id=BItfXx4ozE

Ram, G. S. S. Exposing Critical Safety Failures: A Comprehensive Safety-Weighted Evaluation of LLaMA Models for Biochemical Toxicity Screening. https://openreview.net/forum?id=fpx52DO8oP

Rinberg, R., Bhalla, U., Shilov, I., & Gandikota, R. RippleBench: Capturing Ripple Effects by Leveraging Existing Knowledge Repositories. https://openreview.net/forum?id=rQgPJ3ILLN

Ro, E., Nakachi, Y., Chung, Y., & Basart, S. Biorisk-Shift: Converting AI Vulnerabilities into Biological Threat Vectors. https://openreview.net/forum?id=MwajedbCfX

Simecek, P. Structural Persistence Despite Sequence Redaction: A Biosecurity Evaluation of Protein Language Models. https://openreview.net/forum?id=Jhj4rG9Oio

Sondej, F., Yang, Y., Kniejski, M., & Windys, M. Robust LLM Unlearning with MUDMAN: Meta-Unlearning with Disruption Masking And Normalization. https://openreview.net/forum?id=7FGZVr6vlK

Song, Z., Zheng, C., Li, J., Xie, L., & Xiang, Y. Benchmarking diffusion models for predicting perturbed cellular responses. https://openreview.net/forum?id=of2ZA4Zmv6

Wasi, A. T., & Hoque, M. I. Position: Biosafety-Critical Adjacent Technologies are Critical for Scalable and Safe Clinical Multi-modal LLM Deployment. https://openreview.net/forum?id=oPSMbYw7zx

Wasi, A. T., & Islam, M. R. Perspective: Lessons from Cybersecurity for Biological AI Safety. https://openreview.net/forum?id=AFRn7DfXXE

Wasi, A. T., Islam, M. R., & Priti, R. N. Position: Without Global Governance, AI-Enabled Biodesign Tools Risk Dangerous Proliferation. https://openreview.net/forum?id=x3yCeCEIb3

Wei, B., Che, Z., Li, N., Götting, J., Nedungadi, S., Michael, J., Yue, S., Hendrycks, D., Henderson, P., Wang, Z., Donoughe, S., & Mazeika, M. Best Practices for Biorisk Evaluations on Open-Weight Bio-Foundation Models. https://openreview.net/forum?id=N5DhtpYJ21

Xu, M. Benchmarking Biosafety in Generative Protein Design: A Stress-Test Framework for Binder Models. https://openreview.net/forum?id=Jf1ee1fyaM

Zhan, H. Biosecurity-Aware AI: Agentic Risk Auditing of Soft Prompt Attacks on ESM-Based Variant Predictors. https://openreview.net/forum?id=JO8gyyeM9L

Zhang, Z., Jin, R., Wang, M., & Cong, L. Securing the Language of Life: Inheritable Watermarks from DNA Language Models to Proteins. https://openreview.net/forum?id=FRNHz65p25

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