AI designs new viruses from scratch: Wright Brothers moment

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Sunday August sixteen, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: AI designs entirely new viruses from scratch in a Wright Brothers moment for medicine, OpenAI ditches sustainable cooling at its Sydney data centre, the US moves to let private companies hack foreign cybercriminals, Washington pressures allies to pick a side in the AI cold war with China, and to close out, two things you can actually try today: the offline reading app Pocket alternative Readwise Reader, and the free open-source photo editor Fotoxx. Let's start with the biology story.

AI designs sixteen functional viruses from scratch, marking a Wright Brothers moment for medicine.

Samantha: Researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute have used artificial intelligence to design sixteen functional viruses with no natural counterparts. The work is published in the journal Science, and scientists are calling it a Wright Brothers moment for pharmaceutical research. The AI model was trained on millions of DNA sequences and then predicted entirely new genomes capable of infecting E coli bacteria. So we are no longer just editing what nature gave us, we are generating brand new viral blueprints from a keyboard.

Bob: And that shift matters because most drug development so far has piggybacked on existing biology. You take a natural virus, you tweak it, you turn it into a therapy. What Stanford and Arc are demonstrating is that AI can propose viable viral structures that evolution never came up with. The immediate promise is medical: engineered viruses that attack drug-resistant bacteria, or precisely target diseased cells. Antibiotic resistance kills more than a million people globally each year, so a fresh tool against superbugs is genuinely significant.

Samantha: But the biosecurity concerns are impossible to ignore. If an AI can design a helpful virus, it can in principle design a harmful one. The researchers restricted their work to bacteria-infecting viruses, not anything that touches human cells, and they say the model does not currently generalise to pathogens dangerous to people. Still, the direction of travel is clear, and governments are going to have to catch up fast.

Bob: For Europe, this cuts two ways. Pharmaceutical research hubs in Basel, Cambridge, and Leiden will want access to this kind of generative biology, and it opens real doors for treatments against antibiotic-resistant infections, which the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has flagged as a growing crisis. At the same time, the EU AI Act does not yet have detailed rules for AI systems that design biological agents. Expect that gap to move up the agenda in Brussels, alongside pressure to update the biosecurity frameworks that currently focus on physical labs, not code.

OpenAI drops recycled water cooling in Sydney and picks a more energy-hungry system instead.

Samantha: OpenAI has quietly dropped its plans to cool its large S7 data centre in Sydney using recycled water. According to Reuters, the company will now install a closed-loop liquid cooling system that avoids drinking water entirely, but consumes considerably more electricity to run the fan arrays that dump the heat. This undermines Australian government efforts to reduce the resource drain from the booming data centre sector, and it lands right as Sydney's power grid is already under strain.

Bob: The trade-off here is genuinely awkward. Recycled water cooling was the environmentally sensible option because it reuses waste water and puts less pressure on drinking supplies. Closed-loop systems keep water out of the equation, which sounds cleaner, but they lean much harder on the electricity grid. Critics quoted by Reuters point out that the extra power demand will effectively be paid for by other grid users, since Sydney households and businesses share that same capacity.

Samantha: The bigger pattern is what should worry European regulators. Data centre operators keep announcing sustainability commitments, and then quietly walking them back when the engineering gets hard or the timelines get tight. Ireland, the Netherlands, and Frankfurt are already wrestling with grid constraints from AI training clusters. If closed-loop electric cooling becomes the default globally, European grid operators need to plan for a bigger baseload from AI infrastructure than most current forecasts assume.

Bob: And for European policymakers there is a governance question here too. The EU's Energy Efficiency Directive requires large data centres to report energy and water use from this year onward, but it does not force operators to pick the greener option when a trade-off exists. This Sydney decision is a preview of the arguments Brussels and national regulators will be having with hyperscalers about which resource, water or electricity, they are allowed to prioritise.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

The White House wants to let private US companies hack foreign cybercriminals on behalf of the government.

Bob: The Trump administration has issued a presidential memorandum that opens the door for some private US companies to conduct offensive cyber operations against foreign cybercriminals. This is work that has traditionally been reserved for agencies like the FBI, the NSA, and Cyber Command. Under the new policy, any participating company would have to be under federal contract, and the stated targets are ransomware gangs, financial fraud rings, and other transnational criminal groups operating from abroad.

Samantha: What is striking is that current US anti-hacking law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, broadly bans exactly this kind of activity. So the administration is essentially carving out a licensed exception for approved contractors. Supporters argue that private sector cyber talent is faster and more nimble than government teams, and that ransomware losses now run into tens of billions of dollars a year. Critics, including several voices in the US cybersecurity industry itself, warn that this is a step toward legal vigilantism, with all the collateral damage that implies.

Bob: The European angle is where this gets genuinely thorny. Cybercriminals rarely respect neat national borders. A ransomware server used to attack a US hospital might sit in a data centre in Germany, or route through infrastructure in the Netherlands. If a US contractor takes offensive action against that server, that is potentially an unauthorised intrusion into European systems, and European law is very clear that this is illegal, regardless of who authorised it in Washington.

Samantha: European law enforcement agencies including Europol have spent years building formal channels for cross-border cyber cooperation, exactly to avoid this kind of freelancing. Legal experts quoted in the reporting warn that private-sector offensive operations could complicate ongoing investigations, contaminate evidence, and create jurisdictional headaches. Expect European governments to seek clarity from Washington on how, and whether, these contractors will be constrained when their targets touch EU soil.

Washington tells allies they must pick a side between US and Chinese AI, no more hedging.

Bob: The United States is now telling its international partners bluntly that they must align with either the US or China in the global AI race. According to a US official, the message is quote you cannot have it both ways, unquote, meaning countries cannot credibly partner in both technology ecosystems simultaneously. This is a significant hardening of the technology diplomacy that has been building for a couple of years, and it applies pressure on decisions ranging from chip purchases to cloud partnerships to AI research collaboration.

Samantha: For Europe this is uncomfortable, because the EU has spent years positioning itself as a third pole, a regulator and a partner to both sides rather than a client of either. European carmakers depend on Chinese battery supply chains and the Chinese consumer market. European researchers publish jointly with Chinese universities on AI. At the same time, the underlying compute, the Nvidia chips, the hyperscale cloud, and most of the frontier models, sits firmly on the American side.

Bob: The bottom line is that European governments will now face concrete choices they had hoped to defer. Does a national AI strategy use Chinese open source models like DeepSeek or Alibaba's Qwen alongside American ones. Do European telecoms operators still buy Huawei networking gear for AI-adjacent infrastructure. Does the European Commission's AI Continent plan, with its planned AI gigafactories, need to specify which supply chains are acceptable. These questions were manageable when Washington and Beijing both tolerated ambiguity. That tolerance is now visibly evaporating.

Samantha: What this also does is put pressure on the EU's own AI sovereignty ambitions. Brussels has been pushing for European alternatives, from Mistral in France to Aleph Alpha in Germany, precisely so that Europe is not forced to pick. But those alternatives are still small compared to the American frontier labs. If Washington insists on binary alignment, expect European capitals to push harder and faster on domestic AI investment, because being told to choose sides is exactly the wet-cold shower European industrial policy has been waiting for.

The read-it-later app Readwise Reader saves articles, PDFs, and newsletters into one calm reading queue.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today. First up, if you are the sort of person who opens twenty browser tabs full of articles you swear you will read later, Readwise Reader is worth a look. It is a read-it-later app that pulls in web articles, PDFs, email newsletters, ebook highlights, YouTube transcripts, and even Twitter threads, and puts them all into one clean reading queue. The idea is to stop your inbox and browser being the graveyard of things you meant to read.

Samantha: What makes Reader different from older read-it-later apps is how it handles highlighting and notes. When you underline something in an article, that highlight syncs into a personal knowledge base you can search and revisit. Long-time users say it is particularly good for research, journalism, and studying, because you build up a private library of everything that struck you across every source. It works in the browser, on iOS, and on Android, and it also plays nicely with e-ink readers like reMarkable and Kindle.

Bob: The catch is that Reader is not free. It is part of the Readwise subscription, which runs around ten euros a month, though there is a generous free trial and a student discount. There is also an AI feature that will summarise long articles or answer questions about your saved library, which is off by default if you would rather keep it distraction-free. It is a Swiss company adjacent product, well regarded on privacy, and everything you save can be exported at any time.

Samantha: The practical test is whether it changes your habits within a week. Users report that once they route newsletters and long reads into Reader instead of email, their actual reading time goes up, because the friction of finding the piece again disappears. If you have ever bookmarked an article, closed the tab, and never found it again, that is the exact problem this tool is built for. Grab the free trial, point your newsletters at your Reader inbox, and see if by next Sunday your open tab count has dropped.

The free open-source photo editor Fotoxx lets you organise and edit thousands of photos on your own Linux or Windows machine.

Bob: And the second thing to try today is Fotoxx, a free open-source photo editor and manager that runs on Linux and, via workarounds, on Windows. It is aimed at people with big personal photo libraries, think years of holiday snaps and family pictures, who want to organise, tag, and edit them without handing everything to Google Photos or Apple.

Samantha: Fotoxx is not trying to be Photoshop. What it does well is the everyday stuff: cropping, straightening, adjusting exposure and colour, removing red-eye, and stitching multiple shots into panoramas or high dynamic range images. It also has a solid tagging and search system, so you can label pictures by person, place, or event, and then find them later by typing a keyword. Everything stays on your own computer, no cloud upload, no account required.

Bob: The interface is admittedly not the prettiest, this is a project maintained by a small open-source team, not a designer-led startup. But reviewers regularly praise how fast it handles very large photo collections, tens of thousands of images, on modest hardware. If your laptop has been groaning under a decade of pictures, Fotoxx will feel noticeably lighter than the big commercial alternatives.

Samantha: For European users worried about where their family photos actually live, this is the appealing part. There is no subscription, no telemetry, and no server in another jurisdiction analysing your children's faces. You download it, point it at your photo folder, and you are done. Give it half an hour this afternoon on a folder of last summer's holiday pictures, and you will know quickly whether it earns a permanent place on your machine.

Samantha: Today we covered: AI designing brand new viruses from scratch, OpenAI's water-saving U-turn in Sydney, the White House opening the door to private-sector cyber offence, Washington pressing allies to choose between US and Chinese AI, and two things to try yourself: the reading app Readwise Reader and the open-source photo manager Fotoxx.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.