---
title: "Dual use"
description: "The capacity of the same AI capability to serve harmful ends as well as legitimate ones, for example a toxicity model inverted to propose toxic molecules."
canonical: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/dual-use
author: "Jorge García Aibar"
license: "CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)"
doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197
version: "0.5.0"
updated: 2026-09-24
---

# Dual use

The capacity of the same AI capability to serve harmful ends as well as legitimate ones, for example a toxicity model inverted to propose toxic molecules [1]. It is answered with misuse threat models, red-team cases for harmful uses of legitimate capability and runtime detection.

- Developed in: [ch. 11, Eight characteristics that break classic IT governance](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/ai-defined#eight-characteristics-that-break-classic-it-governance)
- Chapters: [ch. 11, AI Defined](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/ai-defined)
- In the glossary chapter: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/glossary#t-dual-use

## Sources

[1] "Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery" (an inverted toxicity model proposed about 40,000 candidate toxic molecules in under six hours; Nature Machine Intelligence). Urbina, Lentzos, Invernizzi and Ekins (PubMed Central). 2022-03-07. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9544280/ (verified: primary)