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What makes you believe this is possible? What makes you believe it can't be addressed by the boring know-your-customer sales restrictions we already use to prevent this happening? What makes you believe that an AI capable of designing a new deadly virus isn't going to be equally good at putting together new regulatory regimes? Why does not going along with the axioms of this one endlessly-spammed fictional scenario indicate that people who disagree with you don't have half a brain?
Right, "even the month long preview period won't tell us what these models can and cannot do" is also true for humans. We cannot tell if a human might design a deadly new virus. To the extent that AIs are a problem, they are a problem in the same direction as widespread literacy, accessible libraries of books, and the internet: the broadening of knowledge also broadens the circle of people who might abuse this knowledge.
The best solution is pretty clearly physically securing dangerous materials.
For biological hazards, yes, very clearly that is best. But it actually has to be done, not gestured at. Until it's actually done (and getting it done internationally seems realistically feasible here, unlike broader AI safety things), model-level classifiers are a hacky way to mitigate the threat as a bridge until something more robust is developed.
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Technology increases individual power. Power <=> threat. Unless the world we live in is strictly invulnerable, which it pretty clearly is not, increasing technology at some point climbs past the point where complex society is viable.
...alternatively, there's some tech that changes the power <=> threat equation, but it's very hard to imagine how that could happen. Dispersion doesn't solve the problem, stronger defenses don't seem to be a thing even theoretically...
I think this is, at best, an oversimplifcation. If technology increases individual power per individual symmetrically, then the relative power of the individual to society and to other individuals will not change.
But this is not what we observe. At a minimum, technology benefits individual asymmetrically based on their skills. And what we in fact observe is that some technologies really do not increase individual power (particularly relative to others) since they require coordinated action to utilize. Thus some technologies are centralizing and shift the balance of power away from the individual and towards coordinated action, while some technologies are decentralizing and shift the relative balance of power towards the individual. However, even in the cases of decentralizing technologies, the societal collective generally retains more power than the individual by virtue of having more individuals.
The problem with things like "AI-designed viruses" isn't a problem of power, exactly - I would frame it more as a question of the relative strengths of offense and defense. (To explain a bit while I would say that it is not exactly a question of power, a person who has designed a virus still lacks a great deal of power that society retains - perhaps he has the power to kill everyone on Earth, but he still cannot construct an aircraft carrier, for instance. Whereas presumably society could construct both the carrier and the virus, giving it more power as long as it exists).
Some technologies (at least in the military sense) favor the defensive, while some favor the offensive. However, all else being equal, the offense always has an edge over the defense simply because the offensive has greater initiative. Thus the problem with things like "AI viruses" is that the technology is both individually empowering and is feared to favor the attacker.
However, technology will not inevitably favor the attacker. For instance, if you will forgive a toy explanation, think of missile guidance technology. Initially, this favored the attackers. Over time, though, the curve of that technology began to tilt towards the defender, because the technology in its early stages was very good at offensive tasks (hitting static or large targets) and bad at defensive tasks (hitting small, moving targets). But as the technology matured to hit small, moving targets, missiles began to be suitable for defensive tasks. If we imagine a future where missiles are perfectly good at hitting both large, static targets and small, moving targets, then it will favor the defender, since for an equal or lessor expenditure in defensive missiles he can perfectly hit all attacking missiles. Thus, while the attacker will always have the benefit of initiative, technological advancement can favor the defender.
It is not clear to me that the future of technology will favor the attackers inevitably. Many people feel personally empowered by AI, and thus see it as an increase in individual, offensive power. But the technology itself (at the cutting edge) favors coordinated action, resource allocation, funding, and control. Thus it seems possible to me that the long curve of AI technology may end up radically favoring centralized defenders over individual attackers.
Building is hard, destruction is easy. Order is hard, chaos is easy. "The flying bullet down the pass / that whistles clear 'all flesh is grass'". Order must be maintained, sustained, disorder is (largely though not infinitely) self-sustaining. If individuals can cheaply and easily build their own nukes, then society as we know it is obviously impossible to maintain. This holds true for things other than nukes too, and there's probably a point where society's half-like drops into the order of months or years rather than decades without being immediately obvious.
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