DARPA GO could be used for human performance enhancement & bioengineered super-soldiers, along with the ability for total mind control by reading, writing into the brain: perspective

DARPA's Generative Optogenetics (GO) program is gathering advisers across three working groups who will address the biosecurity risks and regulatory hurdles for the commercialization of technologies that can program living cells using light.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) GO program is an ambitious research project that looks to program biology using light as the medium for transferring information, with applications listed as ranging from human performance enhancement to improving medicine, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.

"If successful, this technology could unlock unprecedented capabilities in personalized improvements to warfighter health and performance, agriculture, biomanufacturing, and space exploration by providing open-ended programmability, single-cell spatio-temporal control, and eliminating the need for traditional chemical delivery of genetic information"DARPA, Generative Optogenetics (GO) Working Groups Opportunity, January 2026

However, the ability to directly program living cells with genetic instructions carries with it an enormous potential for abuse, such as the creation of novel "threat agents."

More on that shortly, but first a bit of background on how optogenetic stimulation could one day be weaponized for mind control, which DARPA does not mention.

"We can control the brain […] We can write into the digital twin to control it. Then we can transfer these same neural patterns into the actual brain to write into the brain and control the brain"Surya Ganguli, India AI Impact Summit, February 2026

At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Stanford University researcher Surya Ganguli highlighted experiments that used "AI and lasers to write to the mind of a mouse" and control its brain.

"We were able to use AI to read the mind of a mouse. We could look directly at neural activity in the brain of a mouse, and we could decode what it was seeing […] But we can go further than that to write to the mind of a mouse. By writing-in carefully designed neural activity patterns, we can make the mouse hallucinate a particular percept"Surya Ganguli, India AI Impact Summit, February 2026