Operational Biosecurity Diplomacy

Biosecurity is entering a new era. The rapid advancement of AI and biotechnology is transforming the nature of biological risks and the demands on governance structures and international cooperation required to address those risks effectively. Recently, the White House reportedly directed senior officials across multiple agencies to examine how to counter the ability of advanced AI engineering to enable biological threats. The order underscores the growing confluence of biosecurity, AI safety, and national security.

The international community has developed over the past half century a wide range of institutions, norms, and capabilities to address biological risks in public health, national security, and technology. These efforts, however, have evolved with different objectives and stakeholders, and have often been shaped by institutional, sectoral, and organizational silos. As AI and biotechnology continue to advance rapidly, such fragmentation may increasingly hinder the practical, cross-sectoral collaboration required to keep pace with emerging biological risks.

Operational biosecurity diplomacy (OBD) can counter this trend. It is an approach that complements existing biosecurity and national security frameworks by more systematically integrating technical experts in biology, biotechnology, and emerging risk into diplomatic and security processes. By connecting such expertise with policy advocacy and international cooperation, OBD could help translate existing knowledge and capabilities into more effective practice.

The Gap Between Biological Innovation and Readiness

Established international frameworks such as International Health Regulations (IHR) and Biological Weapons Convention (BWC)remain indispensable, but the biosecurity environment in which they operate is evolving faster than laws and regulations can be drafted. Advances in AI, synthetic biology, biomanufacturing, cloud laboratories, and related technologies are developing at exponential rates, changing the ways biological knowledge is generated, shared, and applied. Governments increasingly drive technological innovation, but so do businesses, academic institutions, internationally connected research networks, and digital platforms. As relevant technologies develop and the range of actors able to use them expands, the pace of innovation continues to accelerate.

At the same time, biological risks are becoming increasingly complex, and advances in AI and biotechnology are creating new challenges. They include AI-enabled biological design, the potential misuse of nucleic acid (DNA and RNA) synthesis technologies to create or modify biological agents with harmful characteristics, and intensifying geopolitical competition for strategic biotechnology. The international capacity to anticipate, assess, and manage these emerging biological risks, however, lags. And, as the pace of technological change accelerates, the international community risks falling further behind in its ability to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from biological threats.

An additional challenge is that the technical expertise required to understand and manage such risks and threats is distributed across governments, scientific institutions, industry, and other sectors. They are also spread across national borders. Closing these gaps consequently requires effective governance and stronger mechanisms that bring together technical experts, regardless of sector and nationality, to better integrate their expertise more directly into existing national security and diplomatic processes. This would enable a faster and more coherent assessment of emerging risks and security challenges. It would also facilitate experts’ abilities to identify potential solutions to biological crises.

The Diplomatic Approach

How can OBD contribute to the effort to meet the growing need for stronger international readiness?

Diplomacy has traditionally served as a primary mechanism through which states manage relationships, advance national interests, negotiate international agreements, develop shared norms, and build confidence. In biosecurity, diplomacy has likewise played a central role in establishing frameworks such as the IHR and BWC, promoting transparency and confidence-building measures, and fostering international cooperation. These functions remain indispensable and will continue to underpin global biosecurity.

Yet as AI and biotechnology advance rapidly and critical capabilities become increasingly available to a wider range of actors, diplomacy needs to do more than negotiate norms and rules. It must play a stronger role in translating those rules and relationships into coordinated action. To do that effectively demands substantial Track 1.5 and Track 2 diplomacy, both of which bring nongovernmental actors into discussions.

The international community possesses substantial scientific expertise, laboratory and diagnostic networks, public health institutions, research and development and manufacturing capabilities for medical countermeasures (MCMs), private-sector innovation, and national security and defense expertise relevant to biological threats. OBD includes the technical experts who understand and operate these resources and gives them a more central role in existing diplomatic and national security processes. When needed, OBD could also help confront biological crises by rapidly accessing expertise, medical countermeasures, and other critical resources across institutional and national boundaries. In essence, OBD does not itself create the capabilities required to respond to a biological crisis.¹ It connects them and helps make them operational.

Building International Readiness

The four pillars of the well-regarded crisis management cycle, developed in the 1970s, provide a useful framework for putting OBD into practice. The cycle is an organizational construct that has been useful to establish planning and preparedness capabilities in health emergency response focused on those mutually reinforcing pillars: prevention, preparation, response, and recovery. OBD does not need to create a new crisis management cycle. Rather, it can use the current construct to serve as a catalyst that brings technical expertise more directly into existing diplomatic and national security processes. The inclusion of dedicated technical expertise would strengthen coordination across the cycle’s four functions, helping it operate more rapidly and flexibly across national and sectoral boundaries.

OBD, however, cannot act alone. It must be supported by biological intelligence,² which integrates epidemiological data, laboratory and diagnostic networks, genomic analysis, developments in AI and biotechnology, supply-chain monitoring, and geopolitical assessments to provide a more comprehensive understanding of biological risk. Biological intelligence therefore should not be understood as a discrete phase of crisis management but as a continuous foundation supporting the entire cycle. Together, the crisis management cycle and biological intelligence can boost global biosecurity.

The first pillar of the crisis management cycle, prevention (or mitigation), focuses on reducing biological risks before they become crises. This includes strengthening international norms, advancing AI and biotechnology governance and safeguards, implementing nucleic acid synthesis screening, enhancing biosafety and biosecurity, and monitoring risks associated with research activities. Recent developments include warnings and voluntary safety assessments by frontier AI companies, emerging government approaches to AI safety and security, and customer and sequence screening by DNA synthesis providers. As AI and biotechnology continue to evolve rapidly, sustained engagement among governments, the private sector, and the scientific community will be increasingly important for identifying and reducing emerging risks at an early stage. Relationships developed among technical experts will be critical to establishing trust and allowing for the sharing of information that helps prevent threats from becoming reality.

The second pillar, preparation, focuses on maintaining and strengthening the capabilities needed before and during biological crises. This requires technical expertise for sustaining laboratory and diagnostic networks; developing and connecting public health and security workforces; strengthening civil-military health collaboration; expanding research, development, and manufacturing capacity for MCMs; strengthening mechanisms for rapid regulatory coordination; maintaining strategic stockpiles; and conducting preparedness exercises. Equally important are sustainable financing mechanisms that allow these capabilities to be developed, maintained, and rapidly mobilized during biological emergencies. 

The third pillar, response, transforms capabilities built and sustained through preparedness into coordinated action. During a biological emergency, expertise, laboratory support, MCMs, financing, and other resources may need to be rapidly mobilized across institutional and national boundaries. Existing deployment mechanisms, such as the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, Emergency Medical Teams, and other international and regional networks, already play important roles. The challenge is not to create new response mechanisms of engagement but to ensure that existing capabilities can be rapidly connected, coordinated, and mobilized when needed. All this depends, to varying degrees, on trusted relationships among technical experts.

Finally, recovery should not be understood simply as a return to pre-crisis conditions. Recovery provides an opportunity to incorporate lessons learned into the next cycle, with experience from each crisis translated into concrete advances in systems, capabilities, and practice. It also provides an opportunity to improve institutions, sustain workforce development, strengthen the resilience of critical supply chains, reinforce sustainable financing mechanisms, and deepen international partnerships where appropriate. Gaps in technical expertise can also be identified and remedied. In this sense, recovery is not the endpoint of the crisis management cycle. It is, rather, the starting point for strengthening the next prevention, preparation, and response phases, and for raising biological intelligence.

Many capabilities required to support the crisis management cycle exist, and new ones are consistently being developed. The key is the speed and effectiveness with which technical expertise and existing capabilities can be coordinated and mobilized across the cycle. By fostering trust across sectors and borders, and enabling regular and sustained communication among essential stakeholders, OBD will contribute to more agile and coordinated responses to biological crises.