Artificial Intelligence gives scientists the ability to design, and even create from scratch, biological molecules and organisms with desirable – if not always benign – properties.
This week, MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum warned that artificial intelligence could change the stakes on existing or even new biological weapons. Although he described this as a potential misuse risk that had not yet been realised, his warning brings renewed urgency to a wider question: how openly are we discussing the purposes of the biological capabilities being developed, and who gets to shape these?
AI is already part of engineering biology. Researchers use it to help design DNA sequences and proteins, predict how biological components might behave, and select designs for laboratory testing. Results from those experiments can then inform the next round of design. This helps researchers explore changes to organisms and biological processes, although computer predictions still need experimental validation.
In autumn 2024, UK Research and Innovation published a showcase celebrating a decade of engineering biology. Its examples were bacteria that dye fabric with fewer chemicals, a treatment for rare metabolic disease in children, and a strawberry yield enhancer. But these media-friendly examples do not tell the full story.
In the same period that the government was promoting the technology as helping build a sustainable future, it was also formally designating engineering biology as a technology with a role in national defence. The government is investing in this technology for food, and it is also investing in it for armour, for batteries, for sensors and for explosives.
Civil and military priorities
The Modern Industrial Strategy, published in June 2025, names engineering biology as one of six frontier technologies in its digital and technologies plan, alongside artificial intelligence, quantum, semiconductors, cyber security and advanced connectivity. The most recent update to that plan, published in June this year, has confirmed that £643 million in UKRI funding is committed to engineering biology to 2029/30. That much was reported as good news for British biotech.
Less noticed in the strategy was a passage on prioritising “frontier industries critical to the development of technologies and capabilities with both civil and military applications.” Engineering biology appears there, alongside aerospace, cyber, nuclear, semiconductors and space. They are all described as areas “where investment supports both economic growth and security.”
The document sets out specific measures for “improv[ing] coordination across government and with industry, collectively identifying priorities for civil-military acquisition and investment.” These include consultation between the Ministry of Defence and other departments, like the science and business departments, when setting future research and development priorities, with additional input from the intelligence community. Industry is to have a greater hand in shaping those plans, partly through defence advisory bodies. Civil servants working at the intersection of national security and science are to be upskilled, including through enhanced coverage of relevant security clearances.
Also, funding bodies across the science and innovation system are to collaborate “to ensure that the wider benefits of funded research in civil-military areas are recognised.” In effect, this reads an instruction to civil research funders – the bodies that fund precision fermentation and agritech – to consider the defence value of what they fund.
In September 2025, the Defence Industrial Strategy named engineering biology in the list of capabilities the UK requires for “warfighting”. The wording of the strategy is more stark than that of the Modern Industrial Strategy and in a place where people working in food and farming might not think to look for it.
Of course, a government is entitled to decide that a technology matters to national security. But closer integration of civil and military priorities is a significant development in how public money for advances in biology is justified. The 2024 public trust survey used to inform the National Vision for Engineering Biology did not ask people about this purpose.. The survey of 3,000 UK adults tested the public’s understanding and acceptance of engineering biology across five applications: healthcare, agriculture and food growth, low carbon fuels, recycling natural waste, and new chemicals and materials. Defence was not one of them.
The survey found that there isn’t a single ‘public opinion’ about the technology; 71% of respondents agreed their view of engineering biology depends on what it is being used for. Moreover, respondents expressed a desire to have a say; with 62% of respondents agreeing that the public should have a say over which applications engineering biology is and is not used for. The statement that government is best placed to make those decisions drew the lowest agreement of any tested, at 45%.
What the survey didn’t find – because it didn’t ask – was how they felt about the use of engineering biology in defence and “warfighting.” The survey, therefore, leaves an important question unanswered: would people respond differently if military applications were included?
A decade of defence research
The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), the Ministry of Defence’s science agency, has been funding this work for over a decade.
In 2014 its Centre for Defence Enterprise ran a competition called Synthetic Biology Applications in Defence, worth up to £4 million. Two years later Dstl announced it was committing up to £18 million over four years to explore what synthetic biology could do for British defence and security, with a particular interest in novel materials offering enhanced ballistic protection and lightweight armour, or transparent screens and lenses that do not mist up.
In 2022 it ran a competition through the Defence and Security Accelerator called Engineering Biology for Defence and Security, with up to £1.5 million available across roughly seven or eight projects. A second phase followed in late 2023, with a further £500,000 for three to five projects, to be completed by March 2025. The three challenge areas were power sources and energy storage, materials, and bio-enabled sensing.
Dstl has showcased applications including improved boron carbide armour and catalysts for fuel cells. Professor Petra Oyston, a Dstl scientist, has described how when the work began in 2012 there was no community anywhere in the world applying synthetic biology to armour materials or improved batteries, and how the UK went on to lead in using biological systems to manufacture novel materials.
Dstl has also published a requirement through the government’s contracts portal, titled Use of Synthetic Biology for the Manufacture of Advanced Energetic Materials. The document explains that the project aims to accelerate the discovery and delivery of new explosives and energetic materials for future use by UK defence and homeland security. Engineering biology, in other words, is being explored as a route to manufacturing explosives.
Using biological systems to manufacture military materials is different from using biological agents as weapons. Armour, batteries and explosives do not, by themselves, establish a biological weapons programme. But they do show why engineering biology’s defence applications need to be part of the public discussion alongside its food, health and environmental uses.
These announcements show a sustained defence interest in engineering biology. They are funding commitments, rather than a verified total of money and cover different periods and programmes. The money earmarked is not substantial in defence-spending terms— around £24 million over a decade, against £643 million now committed on the civil side to 2029/30.
The more significant development is the Industrial Strategy’s proposal for closer coordination, with joint priorities, shared advisory bodies, and funding bodies instructed to recognise the wider benefits of research in civil-military areas. The government wants the technology to serve both.
AI is part of this shared capability: the government’s own Council for Science and Technology has identified it as a tool for designing biological molecules and organisms with desired properties.
This means that a capability the food sector thinks of as fermentation and biomanufacturing is understood elsewhere in government as a route to armour, power and munitions. This makes the purposes guiding that design an important part of the discussion.
Crops, too
Crops have also been the subject of defence-focussed engineering biology, and the most instructive example comes from the United States – the UK’s closest defence science partner.
In 2016 the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a programme called Insect Allies. The idea was to use insects to deliver genetically modified viruses to crops already growing in the field. The stated purpose was food security: if a blight or a deliberate attack threatened a staple crop, you could protect it in weeks rather than waiting years for a new variety.
In 2018 a group of researchers led by R. Guy Reeves at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology published a critique in Science. Their central objection was that the knowledge to be gained appeared very limited in its capacity to improve American agriculture or respond to a national emergency, and the practical and regulatory obstacles had barely been discussed. Therefore, they argued, the programme could reasonably be perceived as developing biological agents for hostile purposes, along with a means of delivering them.
They raised concerns about compatibility with the Biological Weapons Convention if the programme’s stated peaceful justification was not credible. This was a warning about the programme’s potential implications, rather than an established treaty breach. DARPA maintained that there is nothing to fear from the programme; its purpose was to protect crops against natural and deliberately introduced threats.
The UK programmes described in this article do not establish that it is developing insects or crops for hostile purposes, but the argument Reeves and his colleagues were making was much broader than this. It was also about the gap between a technology’s stated purpose and other plausible uses.
Who shapes the purposes of engineering biology?
For food and farming, closer coordination raises practical questions. Could defence priorities influence which biological capabilities attract public funding, which research questions gain prominence, and which alternatives receive less attention? How will farmers, food businesses and the public be involved in those choices? These are questions about the direction of research and the allocation of public money, as well as the safety of individual products.
The National Vision for Engineering Biology commits the UK to “responsible and trustworthy innovation.” That commitment needs to extend to the choices about what the technology is for. Public participation should include visibility over funding priorities, scrutiny of links between civilian and military research, and an opportunity to influence the purposes being pursued before major commitments are entrenched.
A technology sold to the public as an answer to food and climate problems, and simultaneously classified as a defence capability, ought to be the subject of robust public dialogues, with the people whose fields and foods it involves.