AI RISKSArtificial Intelligence Is Facing a Crisis of Control—and the Industry Knows It
Washington appears to be years away from consensus on the expanding security risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence (AI). Concrete international agreements also do not yet exist. There is a tenuous potential path forward to avoid a disaster, but it will require out-of-the-box thinking, intense determination, and unprecedented cooperation.
In the rapidly evolving age of artificial intelligence (AI), new milestones occur at a dizzying pace as the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran vividly illustrates. The war in the Persian Gulf reflects the technology’s deepest integration yet into multifaceted domains of warfighting, including intelligence analysis, target identification, battle simulations, covert reconnaissance, and exotic forms of war disinformation—all executed with astounding speed.
Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, recently touted AI’s influence on the war in a video update. “These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data,” he said. “Advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.”
These developments are indeed impressive, but they are simply data points in a larger transformative narrative that has been accelerating since at least 2023. The world’s leading AI companies are increasingly becoming both architects and instruments of global security in the twenty-first century, rivaling the influence of nation-states. The security environment they are shaping is characterized by a fundamental dynamic: AI companies are developing and unleashing new technologies that can evade human control, a mutating crisis that industry leaders and AI experts have been remarkably transparent in disclosing.
The crisis of control has two dimensions. The first relates to what might be called AI proliferation, the growing capacity for malevolent individuals and groups to potentially use emerging technology to design and deploy a terrifying new generation of chemical weapons, synthetic pathogens, and autonomous cyber weapons that can breach and sabotage the world’s critical infrastructure. The second is equally ominous. AI companies have honestly reported multiple instances when their models engage in elaborate acts of deception and manipulation, and attempt to go rogue.
The world is watching the development of a compounding, consistent, and treacherous problem. Urgent warnings over several years have failed to generate viable solutions to address a metastasizing threat. In the absence of government or societal action, AI companies—the messengers of risk—may have to also be the gamekeepers of this new technology.
