Fourth Eon Biosecurity Institute

We provided $750,000 to Fourth Eon Biosecurity to launch as an independent nonprofit building adaptive biosecurity infrastructure. Its first program is researching and developing function-based screening for nucleic acid synthesis and contributing functional screening criteria to industry standards. Going beyond matching orders against known pathogen databases, their approach uses molecular property prediction to assess what a sequence may do and what risk that poses, which could help synthesis providers flag novel and AI-designed threats. Fourth Eon is also scoping programs in AI safeguards for bioscience, biosecurity evaluations of biological AI models, screening for autonomous labs, and synthesis hardware security.

Fourth Eon is led by co-founders Gary Abel and Chris Ganje.