President Petro is Right: COP16 must and can act on Artificial Intelligence threats to biodiversity.

Jim Thomas, Friends of the Earth US

At the COP16 opening ceremony on Sunday night, Colombian President Gustavo Petro launched a clear series of warnings on the growing threat posed by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry to biodiversity, climate and society. He warned that fossil fuel -powered expansion of the sector and technological elites driving the technology could propel the world towards “armageddon”. He called on the international community to take urgent measures to regulate the deve-lopment and use of artificial intelligence, stressing that without concerted global action, the effects of AI and climate change could be irreversible. “It is necessary to build public, rational and collective regulation to avoid collapse,” he said.

President Petro has bravely opened the door to a conversation that parties at COP16 urgently need to engage in. A global rush is underway to build AI hyperscale data-centers whose heavy computation gobbles up catastrophic amounts of electricity, water (for cooling) and extracted minerals. The climate footprint of data center energy use now outweighs the aviation sector - leading to reopening of coal plants and nuclear facilities. The trade of minerals for AI is driving a disastrous mining boom on indigenous and biodiverse lands. Every chatGPT or similar AI query is equivalent to pouring away half a liter of fresh water - far excee-ding water-take of most nations. As Indigenous Dine activist Janene Yazzie of NDN Collective reminds, “Indigenous rights are a safeguard to prevent further environmental exploitation and destruction to support the data centers and energy needs for AI. Yet, threats to our lands, territories, and ecosystems are increasing as a result of the drive to build this infrastructure.”

Yet the next phase of AI expansion (beyond manipula-ting text and images to using AI for environmental management, agriculture and genetic engineering) stands to dwarf these already heavy impacts. Unsurprisingly AI is now appearing in the negotiation text.

Synthetic Biology and “Generative Biology”: The multidisciplinary expert group (MAHTEG )on Synthetic Biology have clearly signaled how the next phase of biotech uses massive AI models , powered by digital genomic sequences to design novel DNA, proteins and lifeforms. Despite biosafety concerns, this ‘generative biology’ industry (also dubbed ‘black box biology’) is just getting going. It is led by the world’s largest companies (Google, Microsoft, AliBaba, Nvidia and Amazon). Language in the Annex to the Synthetic Biology draft decision would authorize the mAHTEG to do a deeper assessment of how the integration of AI into Synthetic Biology affects the goals of the Convention. But at SBSTTA, even such sensible and urgent knowledge-gathering and analysis was being blocked by Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Japan and Australia. Those brackets have to go.

Digital Sequence Information: The new regime and fund being negotiated on DSI mentions (but mostly appears blind to) the massive change underway from AI-driven biotechnology. While the text concerns itself with public DSI databases, it doesn’t recognize that the world’s existing DSI is already incorporated into private AI training sets intended to generate new commercial proteins or molecules. The world’s richest data companies are already boosting their valuation as a result of this - long before consumer products. The need for more DSI data to train AI models is also reigniting a digital bioprospecting rush. The DSI fund has to explicitly include Artificial Intelligence and private digital bioprospecting companies among those who must already pay into the fund while tracing the source of their DSI use.

In the years to come AI will move to the center of many biodiversity debates as AI titans aim to reshape landscapes, oceans, fields and forests and to capture,extract and industrialize genomes, cultures and ecosystems. President Petro is starting a discussion that we will likely reckon with for decades. The sooner and more seriously we start to engage in this topic the better.

Read more in the report ‘Black Box’ Biotechnology – Integration of artificial intelligence with synthetic biology