Researchers introduced vConTACT3, a machine‑learning framework enabling scalable, hierarchical classification of viruses across eukaryotic and prokaryotic domains, and published methods in Nature Biotechnology. The tool addresses the deluge of viral genomes from metagenomics by automating multirank taxonomic assignments. vConTACT3 leverages hierarchical clustering and trained models to place newly sequenced viruses into a consistent taxonomy, improving reproducibility and enabling large‑scale surveillance. Authors argue that scalable, ML‑driven classification is essential as viral discovery outpaces manual curation. The advancement will influence virology research, public‑health pathogen surveillance and the design of diagnostic reference sets. Bioinformatics teams and data providers will need to adopt interoperable standards if ML taxonomy tools are to become routine in genomic pipelines.