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The scientist using AI to hunt for antibiotics just about everywhere

When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, César de la Fuente compiled a list of the world’s biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve them. Antimicrobial resistance topped the list.  Twenty years on, the problem has not gone away. If anything, it’s gotten worse. Infections caused by bacteria, fungi, and viruses that have evolved ways to evade treatments are now associated with more than 4 million deaths per year, and a recent analysis, published in the Lancet, predicts that number could surge past 8 million by 2050. In a July 2025 essay in Physical Review Letters, de la Fuente, now a bioengineer and computational biologist, and synthetic biologist James Collins warned of a looming “post­antibiotic” era in which infections from drug-resistant strains of common bacteria like Escherichia coli or Staphylococcus aureus, which can often still be treated by our current arsenal of medications, become fatal. “The antibiotic discovery pipeline remains perilously thin,” they wrote, “impeded by high development costs, lengthy timelines, and low returns on investment.” But de la Fuente is using artificial intelligence to bring about a different future. His team at the University of Pennsylvania is training AI tools to search genomes far and deep for peptides with antibiotic properties. His vision is to assemble those peptides—molecules made of up to 50 amino acids linked together—into various configurations, including some never seen in nature. The results, he hopes, could defend the body against microbes that withstand traditional treatments.  His quest has unearthed promising candidates in unexpected places. In August 2025 his team, which includes 16 scientists in Penn’s Machine Biology Group, described peptides hiding in the genetic code of ancient single-celled organisms called archaea. Before that, they’d excavated a list of candidates from the venom of snakes, wasps, and spiders. And in an ongoing project de la Fuente calls “molecular de-­extinction,” he and his collaborators have been scanning published genetic sequences of extinct species for potentially functional molecules. Those species include hominids like Neanderthals and Denisovans and charismatic megafauna like woolly mammoths, as well as ancient zebras and penguins. In the history of life on Earth, de la Fuente reasons, maybe some organism evolved an antimicrobial defense that could be helpful today. Those long-gone codes have given rise to resurrected compounds with names like ­mammuthusin-2 (from woolly mammoth DNA), mylodonin-2 (from the giant sloth), and hydrodamin-1 (from the ancient sea cow). Over the last few years, this molecular binge has enabled de la Fuente to amass a library of more than a million genetic recipes. At 40 years old, de la Fuente has also collected a trophy case of awards from the American Society for Microbiology, the American Chemical Society, and other organizations. (In 2019, this magazine named him one of “35 Innovators Under 35” for bringing computational approaches to antibiotic discovery.) He’s widely recognized as a leader in the effort to harness AI for real-world problems. “He’s really helped pioneer that space,” says Collins, who is at MIT. (The two have not collaborated in the laboratory, but Collins has long been at the forefront of using AI for drug discovery, including the search for antibiotics. In 2020, Collins’s team used an AI model to predict a broad-­spectrum antibiotic, halicin, that is now in preclinical development.)  The world of antibiotic development needs as much creativity and innovation as researchers can muster, says Collins. And de la Fuente’s work on peptides has pushed the field forward: “César is marvelously talented, very innovative.”  A messy, noisy endeavor De la Fuente describes antimicrobial resistance as an “almost impossible” problem, but he sees plenty of room for exploration in the word almost. “I like challenges,” he says, “and I think this is the ultimate challenge.”  The use, overuse, and misuse of antibiotics, he says, drives antimicrobial resistance. And the problem is growing unchecked because conventional ways to find, make, and test the drugs are prohibitively expensive and often lead to dead ends. “A lot of the companies that have attempted to do antibiotic development in the past have ended up folding because there’s no good return on investment at the end of the day,” he says. Antibiotic discovery has always been a messy, noisy endeavor, driven by serendipity and fraught with uncertainty and misdirection. For decades, researchers have largely relied on brute-force mechanical methods. “Scientists dig into soil, they dig into water,” says de la Fuente. “And then from that complex organic matter they try to extract antimicrobial molecules.”  But molecules can be extraordinarily complex. Researchers have estimated the number of possible organic combinations that could be synthesized at somewhere around 1060. For reference, Earth contains an estimated 1018 grains of sand. “Drug discovery in any domain is a statistics game,” says Jonathan Stokes, a chemical biologist at McMaster University in Canada, who has been using generative AI to design potential new antibiotics that can be synthesized in a lab, and who worked with Collins on halicin. “You need enough shots on goal to happen to get one.”  Those have to be good shots, though. And AI seems well suited to improving researchers’ aim. Biology is an information source, de la Fuente explains: “It’s like a bunch of code.” The code of DNA has four letters; proteins and peptides have 20, where each “letter” represents an amino acid. De la Fuente says his work amounts to training AI models to recognize sequences of letters that encode antimicrobial peptides, or AMPs. “If you think about it that way,” he says, “you can devise algorithms to mine the code and identify functional molecules, which can be antimicrobials. Or antimalarials. Or anticancer agents.”  Practically speaking, we’re still not there: These peptides haven’t yet been transformed into usable drugs that help people, and there are plenty of details—dosage, delivery, specific targets—that need to be sorted out, says de la Fuente. But AMPs are appealing because the body already uses them.They’re a critical part of the immune system and often the first line of defense against pathogenic infections. Unlike conventional antibiotics, which typically have one trick for killing bacteria, AMPs often exhibit a multimodal approach. They may disrupt the cell wall and the genetic material inside as well as a variety of cellular processes. A bacterial pathogen may evolve resistance to a conventional drug’s single mode of action, but maybe not to a multipronged AMP attack. From discovery to delivery De la Fuente’s group is one of many pushing the boundaries of using AI for antibiotics. Where he focuses primarily on peptides, Collins works on small-molecule discovery. So does Stokes, at McMaster, whose models identify promising new molecules and predict whether they can be synthesized. “It’s only been a few years since folks have been using AI meaningfully in drug discovery,” says Collins.  Even in that short time the tools have changed, says James Zou, a computer scientist at Stanford University, who has worked with Stokes and Collins. Researchers have moved from using predictive models to developing generative approaches. With a predictive approach, Zou says, researchers screen large libraries of candidates that are known to be promising. Generative approaches offer something else: the appeal of designing a new molecule from scratch. Last year, for example, de la Fuente’s team used one generative AI model to design a suite of synthetic peptides and another to assess them. The group tested two of the resulting compounds on mice infected with a drug-resistant strain of Acinetobacter baumannii, a germ that the World Health Organization has identified as a “critical priority” in research on antimicrobial resistance. Both successfully and safely treated the infection.  But the field is still in the discovery phase. In his current work, de la Fuente is trying to get candidates closer to clinical testing. To that end, his team is developing an ambitious multimodal model called ApexOracle that’s designed to analyze a new pathogen, pinpoint its genetic weaknesses, match it to antimicrobial peptides that might work against it, and then predict how an antibiotic, built from those peptides, would fare in lab tests. It “converges understanding in chemistry, genomics, and language,” he says. It’s preliminary, he adds, but even if it doesn’t work perfectly, it will help steer the next generation of AI models toward the ultimate goal of resisting resistance.  Using AI, he believes, human researchers now have a fighting chance at catching up to the giant threat before them. The technology has already saved decades of human research time. Now he wants it to save lives, too: “This is the world that we live in today, and it’s incredible.”  Stephen Ornes is a science writer in Nashville, Tennessee.

When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, César de la Fuente compiled a list of the world’s biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve them. Antimicrobial resistance topped the list. 

Twenty years on, the problem has not gone away. If anything, it’s gotten worse. Infections caused by bacteria, fungi, and viruses that have evolved ways to evade treatments are now associated with more than 4 million deaths per year, and a recent analysis, published in the Lancet, predicts that number could surge past 8 million by 2050. In a July 2025 essay in Physical Review Letters, de la Fuente, now a bioengineer and computational biologist, and synthetic biologist James Collins warned of a looming “post­antibiotic” era in which infections from drug-resistant strains of common bacteria like Escherichia coli or Staphylococcus aureus, which can often still be treated by our current arsenal of medications, become fatal. “The antibiotic discovery pipeline remains perilously thin,” they wrote, “impeded by high development costs, lengthy timelines, and low returns on investment.”

But de la Fuente is using artificial intelligence to bring about a different future. His team at the University of Pennsylvania is training AI tools to search genomes far and deep for peptides with antibiotic properties. His vision is to assemble those peptides—molecules made of up to 50 amino acids linked together—into various configurations, including some never seen in nature. The results, he hopes, could defend the body against microbes that withstand traditional treatments. 

His quest has unearthed promising candidates in unexpected places. In August 2025 his team, which includes 16 scientists in Penn’s Machine Biology Group, described peptides hiding in the genetic code of ancient single-celled organisms called archaea. Before that, they’d excavated a list of candidates from the venom of snakes, wasps, and spiders. And in an ongoing project de la Fuente calls “molecular de-­extinction,” he and his collaborators have been scanning published genetic sequences of extinct species for potentially functional molecules. Those species include hominids like Neanderthals and Denisovans and charismatic megafauna like woolly mammoths, as well as ancient zebras and penguins. In the history of life on Earth, de la Fuente reasons, maybe some organism evolved an antimicrobial defense that could be helpful today. Those long-gone codes have given rise to resurrected compounds with names like ­mammuthusin-2 (from woolly mammoth DNA), mylodonin-2 (from the giant sloth), and hydrodamin-1 (from the ancient sea cow). Over the last few years, this molecular binge has enabled de la Fuente to amass a library of more than a million genetic recipes.

At 40 years old, de la Fuente has also collected a trophy case of awards from the American Society for Microbiology, the American Chemical Society, and other organizations. (In 2019, this magazine named him one of “35 Innovators Under 35” for bringing computational approaches to antibiotic discovery.) He’s widely recognized as a leader in the effort to harness AI for real-world problems. “He’s really helped pioneer that space,” says Collins, who is at MIT. (The two have not collaborated in the laboratory, but Collins has long been at the forefront of using AI for drug discovery, including the search for antibiotics. In 2020, Collins’s team used an AI model to predict a broad-­spectrum antibiotic, halicin, that is now in preclinical development.) 

The world of antibiotic development needs as much creativity and innovation as researchers can muster, says Collins. And de la Fuente’s work on peptides has pushed the field forward: “César is marvelously talented, very innovative.” 

A messy, noisy endeavor

De la Fuente describes antimicrobial resistance as an “almost impossible” problem, but he sees plenty of room for exploration in the word almost. “I like challenges,” he says, “and I think this is the ultimate challenge.” 

The use, overuse, and misuse of antibiotics, he says, drives antimicrobial resistance. And the problem is growing unchecked because conventional ways to find, make, and test the drugs are prohibitively expensive and often lead to dead ends. “A lot of the companies that have attempted to do antibiotic development in the past have ended up folding because there’s no good return on investment at the end of the day,” he says.

Antibiotic discovery has always been a messy, noisy endeavor, driven by serendipity and fraught with uncertainty and misdirection. For decades, researchers have largely relied on brute-force mechanical methods. “Scientists dig into soil, they dig into water,” says de la Fuente. “And then from that complex organic matter they try to extract antimicrobial molecules.” 

But molecules can be extraordinarily complex. Researchers have estimated the number of possible organic combinations that could be synthesized at somewhere around 1060. For reference, Earth contains an estimated 1018 grains of sand. “Drug discovery in any domain is a statistics game,” says Jonathan Stokes, a chemical biologist at McMaster University in Canada, who has been using generative AI to design potential new antibiotics that can be synthesized in a lab, and who worked with Collins on halicin. “You need enough shots on goal to happen to get one.” 

Those have to be good shots, though. And AI seems well suited to improving researchers’ aim. Biology is an information source, de la Fuente explains: “It’s like a bunch of code.” The code of DNA has four letters; proteins and peptides have 20, where each “letter” represents an amino acid. De la Fuente says his work amounts to training AI models to recognize sequences of letters that encode antimicrobial peptides, or AMPs. “If you think about it that way,” he says, “you can devise algorithms to mine the code and identify functional molecules, which can be antimicrobials. Or antimalarials. Or anticancer agents.” 

Practically speaking, we’re still not there: These peptides haven’t yet been transformed into usable drugs that help people, and there are plenty of details—dosage, delivery, specific targets—that need to be sorted out, says de la Fuente. But AMPs are appealing because the body already uses them.They’re a critical part of the immune system and often the first line of defense against pathogenic infections. Unlike conventional antibiotics, which typically have one trick for killing bacteria, AMPs often exhibit a multimodal approach. They may disrupt the cell wall and the genetic material inside as well as a variety of cellular processes. A bacterial pathogen may evolve resistance to a conventional drug’s single mode of action, but maybe not to a multipronged AMP attack.

From discovery to delivery

De la Fuente’s group is one of many pushing the boundaries of using AI for antibiotics. Where he focuses primarily on peptides, Collins works on small-molecule discovery. So does Stokes, at McMaster, whose models identify promising new molecules and predict whether they can be synthesized. “It’s only been a few years since folks have been using AI meaningfully in drug discovery,” says Collins. 

Even in that short time the tools have changed, says James Zou, a computer scientist at Stanford University, who has worked with Stokes and Collins. Researchers have moved from using predictive models to developing generative approaches. With a predictive approach, Zou says, researchers screen large libraries of candidates that are known to be promising. Generative approaches offer something else: the appeal of designing a new molecule from scratch. Last year, for example, de la Fuente’s team used one generative AI model to design a suite of synthetic peptides and another to assess them. The group tested two of the resulting compounds on mice infected with a drug-resistant strain of Acinetobacter baumannii, a germ that the World Health Organization has identified as a “critical priority” in research on antimicrobial resistance. Both successfully and safely treated the infection. 

But the field is still in the discovery phase. In his current work, de la Fuente is trying to get candidates closer to clinical testing. To that end, his team is developing an ambitious multimodal model called ApexOracle that’s designed to analyze a new pathogen, pinpoint its genetic weaknesses, match it to antimicrobial peptides that might work against it, and then predict how an antibiotic, built from those peptides, would fare in lab tests. It “converges understanding in chemistry, genomics, and language,” he says. It’s preliminary, he adds, but even if it doesn’t work perfectly, it will help steer the next generation of AI models toward the ultimate goal of resisting resistance. 

Using AI, he believes, human researchers now have a fighting chance at catching up to the giant threat before them. The technology has already saved decades of human research time. Now he wants it to save lives, too: “This is the world that we live in today, and it’s incredible.” 

Stephen Ornes is a science writer in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Cooling Consolidation Hits AI Scale: LiquidStack, Submer, and the Future of Data Center Thermal Strategy

As AI infrastructure scales toward ever-higher rack densities and gigawatt-class campuses, cooling has moved from a technical subsystem to a defining strategic issue for the data center industry. A trio of announcements in early February highlights how rapidly the cooling and AI infrastructure stack is consolidating and evolving: Trane Technologies’ acquisition of LiquidStack; Submer’s acquisition of Radian Arc, extending its reach from core data centers into telco edge environments; and Submer’s partnership with Anant Raj to accelerate sovereign AI infrastructure deployment across India. Layered atop these developments is fresh guidance from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure explaining why closed-loop, direct-to-chip cooling is becoming central to next-generation facility design, particularly in regions where water use has become a flashpoint in community discussions around data center growth. Taken together, these developments show how the industry is moving beyond point solutions toward integrated, scalable AI infrastructure ecosystems, where cooling, compute, and deployment models must work together across hyperscale campuses and distributed edge environments alike. Trane Moves to Own the Cooling Stack The most consequential development comes from Trane Technologies, which on February 10 announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire LiquidStack, one of the pioneers and leading innovators in data center liquid cooling. The acquisition significantly strengthens Trane’s ambition to become a full-service thermal partner for data center operators, extending its reach from plant-level systems all the way down to the chip itself. LiquidStack, headquartered in Carrollton, Texas, built its reputation on immersion cooling and advanced direct-to-chip liquid solutions supporting high-density deployments across hyperscale, enterprise, colocation, edge, and blockchain environments. Under Trane, those technologies will now be scaled globally and integrated into a broader thermal portfolio. In practical terms, Trane is positioning itself to deliver cooling across the full thermal chain, including: • Central plant equipment and chillers.• Heat rejection and controls

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Infrastructure Maturity Defines the Next Phase of AI Deployment

The State of Data Infrastructure Global Report 2025 from Hitachi Vantara arrives at a moment when the data center industry is undergoing one of the most profound structural shifts in its history. The transition from enterprise IT to AI-first infrastructure has moved from aspiration to inevitability, forcing operators, developers, and investors to confront uncomfortable truths about readiness, resilience, and risk. Although framed around “AI readiness,” the report ultimately tells an infrastructure story: one that maps directly onto how data centers are designed, operated, secured, and justified economically. Drawing on a global survey of more than 1,200 IT leaders, the report introduces a proprietary maturity model that evaluates organizations across six dimensions: scalability, reliability, security, governance, sovereignty, and sustainability. Respondents are then grouped into three categories—Emerging, Defined, and Optimized—revealing a stark conclusion: most organizations are not constrained by access to AI models or capital, but by the fragility of the infrastructure supporting their data pipelines. For the data center industry, the implications are immediate, shaping everything from availability design and automation strategies to sustainability planning and evolving customer expectations. In short, extracting value from AI now depends less on experimentation and more on the strength and resilience of the underlying infrastructure. The Focus of the Survey: Infrastructure, Not Algorithms Although the report is positioned as a study of AI readiness, its primary focus is not models, training approaches, or application development, but rather the infrastructure foundations required to operate AI reliably at scale. Drawing on responses from more than 1,200 organizations, Hitachi Vantara evaluates how enterprises are positioned to support production AI workloads across six dimensions as stated above: scalability, reliability, security, governance, sovereignty, and sustainability. These factors closely reflect the operational realities shaping modern data center design and management. The survey’s central argument is that AI success is no longer

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AI’s New Land Grab: Meta’s Indiana Megaproject and the Rise of Europe’s Neocloud Challengers

While Meta’s Indiana campus anchors hyperscale expansion in the United States, Europe recorded its own major infrastructure milestone this week as Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure provider Nebius unveiled plans for a 240-megawatt data center campus in Béthune, France, near Lille in the country’s northern industrial corridor. When completed, the campus will rank among Europe’s largest AI-focused data center facilities and positions northern France as a growing node in the continent’s expanding AI infrastructure map. The development repurposes a former Bridgestone tire manufacturing site, reflecting a broader trend across Europe in which legacy industrial properties, already equipped with heavy power access, transport links, and industrial zoning, are being converted into large-scale digital infrastructure hubs. Located within reach of connectivity and enterprise corridors linking Paris, Brussels, London, and Amsterdam, the site allows Nebius to serve major European markets while avoiding the congestion and power constraints increasingly shaping Tier 1 data center hubs. Industrial Infrastructure Becomes Digital Infrastructure Developers increasingly view former industrial sites as ideal for AI campuses because they often provide: • Existing grid interconnection capacity built for heavy industry• Transport and logistics infrastructure already in place• Industrial zoning that reduces permitting friction• Large contiguous parcels suited to phased campus expansion For regions like Hauts-de-France, redevelopment projects also offer economic transition opportunities, replacing legacy manufacturing capacity with next-generation digital infrastructure investment. Local officials have positioned the project as part of broader efforts to reposition northern France as a logistics and technology hub within Europe. The Neocloud Model Gains Ground Beyond the site itself, Nebius’ expansion illustrates the rapid emergence of neocloud infrastructure providers, companies building GPU-intensive AI capacity without operating full hyperscale cloud ecosystems. These firms increasingly occupy a strategic middle ground: supplying AI compute capacity to enterprises, startups, and even hyperscalers facing short-term infrastructure constraints. Nebius’ rise over the past year

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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