A Technological Perspective on Misuse of Available AI
Lukas Pöhler, Valentin Schrader, Alexander Ladwein, Florian von Keller
TL;DR
This paper addresses the risk that civilian AI, widely available and open, can be repurposed for malicious use across digital, political, and physical domains, potentially enabling autonomous weapons. It defines AI systems as more than algorithms, emphasizing data, goal definition, interfaces, and decision engines, and argues that openness accelerates both innovation and misuse. Through three concrete use cases—spear-phishing, deepfake propaganda, and autonomous swarm strategies—it demonstrates feasibility and the threat landscape. It then argues that states must engage in governance and proposes a 'points of control' framework to restrict diffusion and counter attacks, alongside non-technical measures like international collaboration and civil-society involvement. The work highlights the need for proactive monitoring, data and hardware controls, and a transdisciplinary codex to balance openness with security.
Abstract
Potential malicious misuse of civilian artificial intelligence (AI) poses serious threats to security on a national and international level. Besides defining autonomous systems from a technological viewpoint and explaining how AI development is characterized, we show how already existing and openly available AI technology could be misused. To underline this, we developed three exemplary use cases of potentially misused AI that threaten political, digital and physical security. The use cases can be built from existing AI technologies and components from academia, the private sector and the developer-community. This shows how freely available AI can be combined into autonomous weapon systems. Based on the use cases, we deduce points of control and further measures to prevent the potential threat through misused AI. Further, we promote the consideration of malicious misuse of civilian AI systems in the discussion on autonomous weapon systems (AWS).