Here’s a bargain of the most horrifying kind: For less than $100,000, it may now be possible to use artificial intelligence to develop a virus that could kill millions of people.

That’s the conclusion of Jason Matheny, the president of the RAND Corporation, a think tank that studies security matters and other issues.

“It wouldn’t cost more to create a pathogen that’s capable of killing hundreds of millions of people versus a pathogen that’s only capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people,” Matheny told me.

In contrast, he noted, it could cost billions of dollars to produce a new vaccine or antiviral in response.

I told Matheny that I’d been The Times’s Tokyo bureau chief when a religious cult called Aum Shinrikyo had used chemical and biological weapons in terror attacks, including one in 1995 that killed 13 people in the Tokyo subway. “They would be capable of orders of magnitude more damage” today, Matheny said.

I’m a longtime member of the Aspen Strategy Group, a bipartisan organization that explores global security issues, and our annual meeting this month focused on artificial intelligence. That’s why Matheny and other experts joined us — and then scared us.