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Secret watermark labels proteins as ‘made by AI’
Elie Dolgin is a science journalist in Somerville, Massachusetts.
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Proteins (artist’s illustration) designed by AI tools can now incorporate a hidden digital tag revealing their origins. Credit: Christoph Burgstedt/SPL
Proteins designed by artificial intelligence could soon carry a hidden signature of their machine-generated origins, thanks to a watermarking system described today in Nature1.
The technology, developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London, borrows a trick that is already used to identify AI-made content across images, video, audio and text. It involves weaving a faint statistical tell into both the amino-acid sequence and 3D shape of computer-designed proteins — without noticeably compromising their function.
Known as SynthIDBio, the approach could distinguish AI-generated proteins in biological repositories from their natural counterparts, helping to preserve the integrity of databases that underpin both scientific research and biosecurity screening.
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Steph Guerra, a biosecurity scholar at the non-profit research organization RAND in Washington DC, sees value in an approach that aligns interests across the life-sciences community. Watermarking can support innovation and scientific reproducibility, she says, “and, at the same time, have a security benefit”.
The catch is that this molecular stamp can be scrubbed away. Someone who wants to erase the ‘made by AI’ tag can, in many cases, run a watermarked protein through another design tool and generate a new sequence that retains the protein’s structure and function but obscures its synthetic origins.
It is therefore best viewed as one more tool in a layered framework for guarding against biological threats, says Tessa Alexanian, a biosecurity researcher formerly at the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, a non-profit organization in Geneva, Switzerland. “We’re in a wild new world,” she says.