Measuring Biological Capabilities and Risks of AI Agents

This paper addresses a rapidly emerging policy challenge: how to generate and interpret credible evidence about the biological capabilities and risks of AI scientists, or agentic AI systems capable of autonomously or collaboratively performing multi-step scientific tasks. As these systems enter real research workflows, decision-makers increasingly face evaluation results whose meaning depends on underlying design choices that are often implicit or under-documented. We synthesize current evidence on AI-enabled biological risks and introduce biological agentic evaluations as a promising, but interpretation-sensitive, tool for assessing these systems. Our central contribution is a set of practical, experience-grounded considerations -- drawing from our own evaluations -- that show how choices around defining, designing, running, scoring, and documenting evaluations materially shape what results do and do not imply about risk. The analysis is intended to help policymakers interpret biological evaluation outputs with appropriate caution; guide public and private funders toward high-leverage investments in AI-biology evaluation research; and support biosecurity practitioners assessing emerging AI systems. A secondary audience includes researchers designing or conducting agentic evaluations within frontier AI labs, AI providers, scientific institutions, and third-party evaluation organizations.

RCTs & Human Uplift Studies: Methodological Challenges and Practical Solutions for Frontier AI Evaluation

Human uplift studies - or studies that measure AI effects on human performance relative to a status quo, typically using randomized controlled trial (RCT) methodology - are increasingly used to inform deployment, governance, and safety decisions for frontier AI systems. While the methods underlying these studies are well-established, their interaction with the distinctive properties of frontier AI systems remains underexamined, particularly when results are used to inform high-stakes decisions. We present findings from interviews with 16 expert practitioners with experience conducting human uplift studies in domains including biosecurity, cybersecurity, education, and labor. Across interviews, experts described a recurring tension between standard causal inference assumptions and the object of study itself. Rapidly evolving AI systems, shifting baselines, heterogeneous and changing user proficiency, and porous real-world settings strain assumptions underlying internal, external, and construct validity, complicating the interpretation and appropriate use of uplift evidence. We synthesize these challenges across key stages of the human uplift research lifecycle and map them to practitioner-reported solutions, clarifying both the limits and the appropriate uses of evidence from human uplift studies in high-stakes decision-making.