<h2>0: TLDR</h2>
<p>I examined all the biorisk-relevant citations from a policy paper arguing that we should ban powerful open source LLMs.</p>
<p>None of them provide good evidence for the paper's conclusion. The best of the set is evidence from statements from Anthropic which rest upon data that no one outside of Anthropic can even see, <em>and</em> on Anthropic's interpretation of that data. The rest of the evidence cited in this paper ultimately rests on a single extremely questionable "experiment" without a control group.</p>
<p>In all, citations in the paper provide an illusion of evidence ("look at all these citations") rather than actual evidence ("these experiments are how we know open source LLMs are dangerous and could contribute to biorisk").</p>
<p>A recent <em>further</em> paper on this topic (published <em>after</em> I had started writing th