Goodfire develops protein-embedding biosecurity monitors for AI agents

Goodfire Research developed sequence-aware biosecurity monitors that use protein language model embeddings to flag concerning DNA or protein sequences in agent workflows. On a custom dual-use benchmark built around protein toxins, the monitors outperformed frontier model safeguards with fewer refusals on benign requests, reached roughly 0.98 AUROC on paraphrases whose parent proteins were in the screening database, and ran in milliseconds per sequence. The authors report that detection improves as protein models get more capable, and note the paraphrase results rely on in-silico estimates and do not establish whether redesigned proteins retain biological activity.