A Technological Perspective on Misuse of Available AI

TL;DR

This paper examines how openly available civilian AI technologies can be misused for malicious purposes, presenting use cases and discussing control measures to mitigate threats to security.

Contribution

It introduces three concrete use cases demonstrating potential misuse of existing AI technologies for security threats and discusses preventive control measures.

Findings

Existing AI can be combined into autonomous weapon systems

Potential misuse threatens political, digital, and physical security

Control points and measures can mitigate misuse risks

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).