Google’s SynthID Bio can watermark AI-designed protein binders without breaking them

DeepMind developed SynthID Bio, a watermark that hides a signature in designed protein amino-acid sequences and predicted 3D coordinates; wet-lab tests on multiple protein binders and early bacteriophage work show the watermark preserves functionality and remains detectable. The watermark is intended to aid DNA synthesis screening and flag synthetic entries in public biological databases, and DeepMind plans to publish methods, open-source code, and weights; challenges include resistance to deliberate tampering and the need to pair watermarking with provenance and other mitigations.