Biological threats — whether naturally occurring outbreaks, engineered pathogens, or deliberate acts of bioterrorism — represent one of the more complex and consequential risks that public health and national security systems face. The challenge of detecting a pathogen early enough to contain it, developing countermeasures quickly enough to deploy them, and scaling manufacturing fast enough to matter in an emergency has historically been constrained by the speed of human analysis and the limitations of conventional laboratory methods. Artificial intelligence is changing that calculus in meaningful ways, and the U.S. is at the center of that shift.