2026Build the foundation
2026 is the year to establish the legal, institutional, and technical foundation of the plan. The highest-leverage interventions must move from concept to implementation. By year-end, they must be underway: legislation introduced or advancing, standards drafted, pilots launched, commitments secured, and coordination mechanisms operating.
Last updated: May 11, 2026 · Public updates are batched quarterly, with urgent corrections as needed.
Suggested philanthropic spend
$350M
Cumulative
$350M
Prevent
$90M
Detect
$40M
Defend
$220M
2026 Pillar Objectives
Prevent
- Put the highest-leverage upstream safeguards on a path to enforceable adoption, especially synthesis screening, KYC, and AI-bio safeguards.
- Establish credible pilot systems for independent verification of high-risk biological research and for provider-based threat reporting.
- Begin building the institutional foundations for attribution, deterrence, and accountable governance of high-consequence biological research.
Detect
- Begin deployment of a pathogen-agnostic early-warning architecture capable of identifying novel threats before they spread widely.
- Demonstrate that sentinel surveillance can operate across multiple continents and feed useful anomaly signals into review workflows.
Defend
- Begin building the stockpiles, pilots, platform technologies, and coordination mechanisms needed to protect essential workers and accelerate response in a severe pandemic.
- Launch the first real-world deployments and preparedness systems for built-environment biohardening, rapid medical countermeasures, and public-private response coordination.
Milestones
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PreventKnow Your Customer (KYC)
Define harmonized KYC standards for the highest-risk biological tools and services
PreventAI-Bio Safeguards
Secure separate biorisk evaluation commitments for frontier LLMs, biological foundation models, and autonomous AI-lab workflows
PreventResearch Governance
Launch pilot bio-audits, accident-reporting frameworks, and institutional adoption pilots for high-consequence biological research
Launch an information-sharing system for threat reporting among providers of high-risk biological materials and services
DetectGlobal Early Warning
Deploy pathogen-agnostic detection at 20+ sentinel sites with predefined triggers, decision rights, and response personnel
DetectDiagnostics & Testing
Fund development of pathogen-agnostic diagnostic platforms and establish emergency authorization pathways
Launch a U.S. essential-workforce PPE initiative with public-distribution rules and critical-infrastructure workforce mapping
Fund 5+ long-term biohardening pilots and draft government demand-side deployment playbooks
Catalyze a government-led program to identify ten high-leverage MCM platforms and distributed manufacturing paths
Stand up a small delivery team and run concrete exercises for priority response playbooks
Measurement gaps to close
The plan still needs a standard definition of the denominator for "relevant frontier AI / biological foundation model developers"; a clear coverage metric for "high-risk biological services" included in KYC and threat reporting; a standard threshold for what counts as an "operational sentinel site"; a practical definition of "essential workforce" for PPE planning by jurisdiction; a common method for measuring readiness of medical countermeasure platforms before a crisis; and a standard maturity scale for coordination mechanisms beyond simple existence.
Measurement gaps enter the quarterly measurement backlog. Each public update either converts the gap into a tracked metric, turns it into a future milestone or backlog item, or keeps it as a research agenda item with rationale.