Claim and evidence Close ×
Working paper BWC/MSP/2025/WP.4, submitted by the United Kingdom to the 2025 Meeting of States Parties, states in its fifty-year timeline of life-science advances that the AlphaFold protein-folding prediction database published by DeepMind in 2021 accelerated scientific research in fields such as drug discovery but also demonstrated potential for misuse, highlighting the importance of stronger guard rails and AI governance. Copy claim link
Copy claim reference
Machine-checked, not reviewed by an editor Stated in source Supported
Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source
Provision Risk domain · provision ID bwc-wp4-protein-prediction-governance Subject version English text of document BWC/MSP/2025/WP.4, submitted by the United Kingdom · Published 2025-12-10 · Effective date not established Date 2025-12-10 · publication Scope and limits What one State Party's working paper states in a historical timeline, with its own footnoted sources, which were not retrieved. It is not a finding about any system's capability, and the record does not reproduce the paper's characterisation of what the technology could do beyond the general words used here. The paper's wording about what protein design could enable was paraphrased as "potential for misuse" rather than quoted, so that no capability detail is reproduced; only the governance clause is quoted.
The evidence 01 primary source Supports the claim
Scientific and Technological Advances in the Life Sciences since 1975: How the Last 50 Years Will Shape the BTWC S&T Advisory Mechanism (BWC/MSP/2025/WP.4) ↗ United Nations (document of the 2025 Meeting of States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention), submitted by the United Kingdom · Publication date unknown
Copy source reference
Cite the original source Cite the original document, not Selekoa. Check these details against it.
Copy APA
Download BibTeX Download RIS Download CSL-JSON
Source excerpt “highlighting the importance of stronger guard rails and AI governance” Location in source Timeline of scientific and technological advances, entry for 2021, PDF p. 3
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-10-30
Source details and check notes Authors United Nations (document of the 2025 Meeting of States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention), submitted by the United Kingdom Version Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-28 (SHA-256 50e60bf267adfca224470f9af790454791eab2aefde06ae11549e8277144f88f). English PDF of document BWC/MSP/2025/WP.4, dated 21 April 2026 on the UNODA documents list and 10 December 2025 on the document itself; reached through https://docs.un.org/en/BWC/MSP/2025/WP.4, whose iframe resolves to the documents.un.org symbol access endpoint and then to this file URL. Retrieved 2026-10-28. Retrieved again at admission on 2026-10-30 (SHA-256 50e60bf267adfca224470f9af790454791eab2aefde06ae11549e8277144f88f, the same bytes). Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-10-28 Language English (en) Attribution United Nations (document of the 2025 Meeting of States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention), submitted by the United Kingdom, “Scientific and Technological Advances in the Life Sciences since 1975: How the Last 50 Years Will Shape the BTWC S&T Advisory Mechanism (BWC/MSP/2025/WP.4)”. Reuse No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution. Check notes Candidate pack passage, AI and biosecurity (research/ai-bio). The quotation (10 words) matched the text retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-28 and again at admission on 2026-10-30, in a fresh retrieval whose SHA-256 equals the pack’s. Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. Explicit paraphrase of the rest of the entry: in 2021 DeepMind published the AlphaFold database, an artificial intelligence programme for protein folding prediction, which accelerated scientific research in fields such as drug discovery but, the paper says, also showed a potential for misuse. No human editorial review. Status and meaning Editorial status. Not reviewed by an editor . An exploratory record that no editor has accepted. This status does not say whether a person has read any linked passage. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.
Relation. An exact framework edition, or another document with an exact expression, states one provision: a capability threshold or risk level and its trigger, a required safeguard or action, a decision authority (who decides, recommends, can overrule or is informed), a stated exception, or another statement of its content, such as a licence term or a prospectus statement. The passage records what the document says, not implementation, compliance or effectiveness. Provisions with the same key align across editions of one family.
Date. Date on the document itself; the paper dates the AlphaFold database entry to 2021.
Record ID ab-gov-bwc-uk-wp4-alphafold-guardrails