AIWatch.

July 16, 2026 Responsibility & Safety

Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind

The global biosecurity landscape is rapidly evolving. Shifting natural ecosystems, global travel and the potential misuse of AI require greater vigilance — yet AI is also a critical tool for our response. We need frontier AI models, and the scientific advances they will enable, to respond to these challenges and help make society more resilient to events like future outbreaks.

Today, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs are sharing our joint approach to bioresilience.

Our work is twofold - to prevent threat actors from misusing our models, and to ensure that governments, scientists, biosecurity experts and our teams can harness these technologies to build a more resilient world.

Over the past 12 months, we have advanced more than 15 partnerships with government bodies, biosecurity organizations, and research groups to prevent threat actors from misusing our models, detect new outbreaks quickly and respond quickly and effectively.

Inside our bioresilience program

We believe society must harness AI’s advancing capabilities to address infectious diseases and prepare for future outbreaks.

Breakthroughs like Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which mapped the 3D structures of nearly all known proteins; Isomorphic Labs’ AI-powered Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE), which provides the real-world accuracy required to navigate novel biological systems with unprecedented precision; and AlphaGenome, which sheds light on genome function, are radically shifting the balance. Instead of just reacting to natural outbreaks or safety risks, we can now use these intelligent systems to help researchers design proactive defenses, accelerate the discovery of therapeutics, and safeguard the global health ecosystem with greater speed and precision.

With this in mind, we are making our AI models and agents available to trusted partners to support progress across three key areas: prevention, detection and response. Here are some examples:

Prevent:

To ensure our models, like Gemini, are safe and useful to experts, we follow a four-step safety process: threat modeling, evaluations, mitigations and monitoring.

We partner closely with in-house biologists, security experts and external partners to understand potential threats, test our models against them and build in robust safeguards.

Additionally, we’re working on adapting our SynthID watermarking technology to biology, which could help DNA synthesis providers screen for potentially risky, AI-generated biological sequences.

Detect:

We are helping make pathogen surveillance more cost-effective. For example, our agent AlphaEvolve can optimize algorithms used for producing and analyzing metagenomic sequencing data, helping detect new outbreaks faster. This optimization allows for quicker and more accurate DNA analysis, making it cheaper to track diseases worldwide on a large scale.

We are also exploring how technologies like AlphaGenome and Protein Function annotation could be used to help detect and characterize pathogens from sequence data, identifying novel patterns and emerging threats faster than traditional methods.

Respond:

Building on the scientific impact of AlphaFold, we are granting trusted researchers access to Google DeepMind’s latest AI systems to help accelerate the design of vaccines and other countermeasures for both known and novel threats.

To support government bodies and non-profit organizations during novel outbreaks, Isomorphic Labs has established a focused unit to rapidly deploy its drug design engine to design medical countermeasures that could address both naturally occurring pandemics and potential risks arising from the misuse of advanced AI. Working in collaboration with governments and global health authorities to advance a diverse range of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies enables the Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine’s real-world impact for bioresilience.

This is a complex, long-term effort, and part of our broader approach to managing potential Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) risks, aligning with the proactive mitigations and rigorous evaluation protocols of our Frontier Safety Framework.

We are committed to working openly and collaboratively — with biosecurity labs, governments and the broader scientific community — to ensure AI is developed and deployed responsibly to help protect against one of society’s greatest risks.

To read more about our work and our call for new partnerships, see this full update on our approach.