The article argues that recent executive overreach and politicization have severely undermined established norms of U.S. civil-military relations. To restore professional standards, the incoming Congress must actively exercise its oversight powers, moving beyond mere criticism to demanding transparency in defense policy and personnel decisions. Key reforms include enforcing meritocratic promotion processes, requiring documented justification for senior officer removals, and preventing the partisan use of the military. These actions are crucial for bolstering public trust and ensuring the military remains a nonpartisan instrument of civilian control.
Bridging the Digital to Physical Divide: Evaluating LLM Agents on Benchtop DNA Acquisition
English Summary
This report describes eight frontier large language model (LLM) agents on their ability to design DNA segments, interact with a benchtop DNA synthesizer, and generate laboratory protocols. These are dual-use tasks, explored as potential technical bottlenecks to a malicious actor building a viral pathogen that could be weaponized. Performance varied among the models, but all tested LLMs designed biologically coherent DNA segments in some attempts.
中文摘要
本報告描述了八種前沿大型語言模型（LLM）智能體在設計DNA片段、與桌上型DNA合成儀互動以及產生實驗室操作規程的能力。這些任務具有雙重用途，旨在探索惡意攻擊者建構可用於武器化的病毒病原體時可能遇到的技術瓶頸。各模型的表現有所不同，但所有測試的LLM智能體在某些嘗試中都設計出了生物學上連貫的DNA片段。
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