How Will AI Change Cyber Operations? | Appeasement Is Underrated | The Militarization of Latin American Security, and more

the premise of trying to apply offense versus defense balance theory to the cyber domain is a fraught exercise in the first place. Instead, AI will most likely change the distribution of what targets in cyberspace are exploitable. Rather than coming up with a laundry list of where AI could enhance tasks, the focus should instead be on tasks where actors are likely to apply AI.
The exercise is also a policy problem as much as it is a technical problem. Many AI-enhanced techniques are a “double-edged sword” that can aid both the offense and the defense, depending on a variety of geopolitical and economic incentives that affect how individuals, companies, and governments incorporate AI and the preexisting constraints they face. The impact of AI on cyber is mediated through such variables, altering the distribution of cyber threats and offering larger marginal benefits to some actors. For policymakers and practitioners, the focus should be on identifying especially vulnerable targets in specific situations, rather than trying to conduct a net assessment as to whether AI favors the cyber offense or defense writ large. This would help policymakers better incorporate the implications of AI into the next U.S. national cyber strategy.

Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution  (Tanner Greer and Nancy Yu, Foreign Policy)
In early March, global investors turned their eyes toward Beijing, where 2,977 delegates from across China had gathered for the annual session of the National People’s Congress. Here, Chinese Premier Li Qiang would deliver the annual “Report on the Work of the Government.” Here, the priorities that must guide the activities of the Chinese state over the coming year would be proclaimed. Here—or so financiers at home and abroad badly hoped—the Chinese government would declare its plan to rescue China’s economy.
But there were few comforting signs. The 2023 report had placed “expanding domestic demand” as the top priority for that year, responding to the damage done by zero-COVID policies, a bureaucracy paralyzed by purges and confused by an unfavorable economic environment, and a property bubble too large to pop. The 2024 report did not follow suit. Instead, it laid out a road map not for economic recovery but for wider, and more aggressive, targets.
Ahead of “expanding domestic demand,” the new report prioritizes two other goals. First, the Chinese government must “[strive] to modernize the industrial system and [develop] new quality productive forces at a faster pace.” Second, it must “[invigorate] China through science and