Artificial intelligence has started to appear almost everywhere in our lives. We enjoy its benefits, such as the speedier discovery of new drugs, or the more personalised medicine that results from its amalgamation of data and expert judgement, often without realizing it. Generative AI, which enables the fast creation of content and automates summarization and translation via tools such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Claude, is its most popular form, but AI is much more: its techniques, mainly from machine learning, statistics and logic, help generate decisions and predictions while being guided by goals set by users.
But while AI technology can certainly help accelerate research processes that previously took years, AI tools, principles and strategies can also enable the identification of elements for biochemical weapons. AI enables new technologies such as autonomous vehicles, yet their vision systems may be fooled, potentially converting the vehicles into weapons.
AI risks are various and specific, and need to be understood as such, if only because AI systems are complex and adapt over time, making them more unpredictable. AI threats include the data that trains its underlying models, since biased data leads to biased outputs. Moreover, adversaries may use AI to automate attacks at faster speed and larger scale. When AI controls critical systems, an attack can have far-reaching consequences. And since AI tools are widely accessible, there is a low barrier to causing harm with them.
