Moderna Founder Calls for Urgent Regulation of AI Agents

Billionaire biotech mogul Noubar Afeyan has called for urgent regulation of artificial intelligence agents that tech firms are selling, warning that waiting for a disaster risks repeating the past mistakes of the drug industry.

Drawing a parallel with the thalidomide tragedy in the 1950s and 60s, where the drug taken by pregnant women led to birth defects, the founder of Moderna Inc. argued that companies seeking to profit from AI agents must take responsibility of their safety before launching them commercially.

“I believe what we should do is to think carefully about regulating agents that are being commercialized and that are being transmitted outside the boundaries of what somebody may want to do in house,” Afeyan, 64, said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi Tuesday.

Afeyan joins a growing cohort of technology leaders and researchers including OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and Anthropic PBC CEO Dario Amodei, in calling for stronger safeguards as AI grows more powerful and autonomous. Altman and Amodei last month urged world leaders to work together on AI during an appearance before the United Nations Security Council that focused on the technology’s potential existential risks, a stance that contradicts with US President Donald Trump’s pro-technology views.

Regulation should be designed for companies developing AI agents rather than large language models, Afeyan said. “To me, LLMs are capability. Agents are intentionality.”

A new crop of AI agents, which are self-directed and work without the human command, could accelerate drug discovery and scientific research, but also lead to unsafe molecules and flawed findings, experts warn.

Afeyan’s arguments come just days after Anthropic’s Claude AI model carried out additional unintended actions on the digital systems of outside organizations, including submitting a false tip in a police homicide case.

Read more: Altman, Amodei Call on UN, World Leaders to Boost AI Safety

Indian biotech entrepreneur Kiran Mazumdar Shaw also called for AI laws that deal with biomaterials — synthetic substances engineered to replace or treat human organs or tissue.

“Synthetic biology is another area which we really need to look at very carefully. I think it’s both intended bad uses of AI and then the unintended,” Shaw said at the Bloomberg event.