Evo 2 Genomic Foundation Model Probed for Biosecurity Screening in Metagenomic Data

arXiv·medium signal

Jeremy Guntoro, Alexander Dack, and Dylan Danno (arXiv 2607.14070, q-bio.GN/cs.LG) test whether Evo 2's learned sequence representations can screen metagenomic data for biosecurity-relevant features — an application the model was never explicitly trained for. The paper is an early probe of whether genomic foundation models transfer to dual-use screening rather than a deployed system. This is the biosecurity analogue of the safety-eval work happening in LLMs: the capability exists in the representations, and the question is whether it is reliable enough to gate on.