Pillars
The plan is organized around three interlocking pillars — Prevent, Detect, and Respond. Together they form one layered defense system: ensuring that defensive biological capabilities outpace proliferating offensive ones.
Pillar 01
Prevent
Stop dangerous capabilities from being acquired or misused
Prevent stops dangerous capabilities from being acquired or misused before harm occurs. It targets the points in the biological supply chain where offensive capabilities can be constrained, monitored, or blocked.
2027 Foundation Objectives
- Work toward requiring and enforcing the most effective safeguards against biological threats, especially screening DNA orders, verifying customers’ identities, and preventing misuse of AI in biology.
- Establish credible systems for independent verification of high-risk biological research and for provider-based threat reporting.
- Create the institutional foundations for attribution, deterrence, and accountable governance of high-consequence biological research.
See The 5-Year Plan for how these evolve through 2031.
Pillar 02
Detect
Identify threats that prevention misses
Detect builds a pathogen-agnostic early-warning architecture to catch novel or engineered pathogens before they spread widely. Because no preventive system will be perfect, early detection systems must be rapid, continuously operational, and global.
2027 Foundation Objectives
- 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.
See The 5-Year Plan for how these evolve through 2031.
Priorities in this pillar
Pillar 03
Respond
Respond faster than the pathogen can spread
Respond ensures society contains any released pathogen faster than it can spread. It includes essential workforce protection, biohardening of the built environment, rapidly deployed medical countermeasures, and the coordination mechanisms needed to mount an effective public-private response.
2027 Foundation Objectives
- 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.
See The 5-Year Plan for how these evolve through 2031.