MIT AI Risk Repository · domain 4: Malicious actors
4.2 Cyberattacks, weapon development or use, and mass harm
Using AI systems to develop cyber weapons (e.g., coding cheaper, more effective malware), develop new or enhance existing weapons (e.g., Lethal Autonomous Weapons or CBRNE), or use weapons to cause mass harm.
- 82
- 12
- 15
- 14
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Human | 61 |
| AI | 11 |
| Other | 8 |
| Not coded | 2 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Intentional | 68 |
| Other | 10 |
| Not coded | 2 |
| Unintentional | 2 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Post-deployment | 71 |
| Other | 7 |
| Not coded | 2 |
| Pre-deployment | 2 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 1 |
| 2020 | 1 |
| 2022 | 1 |
| 2023 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2 |
| 2025 | 9 |
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Risk Category | 16 |
| Risk Sub-Category | 66 |
Risk entries
Browse and export all- Business operations/infrastructure damage
"Business operations/infrastructure damage - Damage, disruption, or destruction of a business system and/or its components due to malfunction, cyberattacks, etc."
- Violence/armed conflict
"Violence/armed conflict - Use or misuse of a technology system to incite, facilitate or conduct cyberattacks, security breaches, lethal, biological and chemical weapons development, resulting in viol...
- Security & Defense
"AI could enable more serious incidents to occur by lowering the cost of devising cyber-attacks and enabling more targeted incidents. The same programming error or hacker attack could be replicated on...
- Catastrophic risk due to autonomous weapons programmed with dangerous targets
"AI could enable autonomous vehicles, such as drones, to be utilized as weapons. Such threats are often underestimated."
- Warfare and Physical Harm
"The use of AI in warfare is highly alarming and may pose dangers to human safety (Hendrycks et al., 2023). Autonomous drone warfare is being aggressively pursued as a tactic in the current war in Ukr...
- Hazardous Biological and Chemical Technologies
"AI systems such as LLMs, chemical LLMs (Skinnider et al., 2021; Moret et al., 2023), and other LLM- based biological design tools might soon facilitate the production of bioweapons, chemical weapons,...
- Cyber offence
"General- purpose AI systems could uplift the cyber expertise of individuals, making it easier for malicious users to conduct effective cyber- attacks, as well as providing a tool that can be used in...
- Dual use science risks
"General- purpose AI systems could accelerate advances in a range of scientific endeavours, from training new scientists to enabling faster research workflows. While these capabilities could have nume...
- Cyber offence
"Attackers are beginning to use general- purpose AI for offensive cyber operations, presenting growing but currently limited risks. Current systems have demonstrated capabilities in low- and medium- c...
- Biological and chemical attacks
"Growing evidence shows general- purpose AI advances beneficial to science while also lowering some barriers to chemical and biological weapons development for both novices and experts. New language m...
- CBRN
"Chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) risks are broad classes of threats that have the potential to cause harm to a large number of people. Explosives are also sometimes included in...
- Cyber offense
"Cyber risks, especially in the context of cyber offense, are an existing threat that may be exacerbated by AI. [108] demonstrated that teams of LLM agents can exploit zero-day vulnerabilities when gi...
- Eased development of technologies that make a global catastrophe more likely
- AI enables development of weapons of mass destruction
"AI is already enabling the development of weapons which could cause mass destruction —including new weapons that themselves use AI capabilities, such as Lethal Autonomous Weapons [2],10 and the poten...
- Type 5: Criminal weaponization
One or more criminal entities could create AI to intentionally inflict harms, such as for terrorism or combating law enforcement.
- Type 6: State Weaponization
AI deployed by states in war, civil war, or law enforcement can easily yield societal-scale harm
- Cyber Attacks
"Hackers can obtain malicious code in a low-cost and efficient manner to automate cyber attacks with powerful LLM systems."
- Dual Use Science risks
"Frontier AI systems have the potential to accelerate advances in the life sciences, from training new scientists to enabling faster scientific workflows. While these capabilities will have tremendous...
- Cyber
"As the programming abilities of AI systems continue to expand, frontier AI is likely to significantly exacerbate existing cyber risks. Most notably, AI systems can be used by potentially anyone to cr...
- Security
"Though chatbots cannot (yet) develop their own novel malware from scratch, hackers could soon potentially use the coding abilities of large language models like ChatGPT to create malware that can the...
- Malicious use and abuse (cyberattacks)
"Generative AI can help amplify the frequency and destructiveness of cyberattacks.311 It has the capacity “to increase the accessibility, success rate, scale, speed, stealth, and potency of cyberattac...
- Malicious use and abuse (biosecurity threats)
"Many fear that generative AI could make the creation of biological weapons easier by providing access to critical knowledge and automated assistance to a wider range of actors to engage in malicious...
- Malicious use and abuse (military applications)
"The advancement of AI for military purposes is rapidly ushering in a new phase of growth in military technology. Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) possess the capability to detect, engage, and...
- Offensive Cyber Operations (General)
"Offensive cyber operations are malicious attacks on computer systems and networks aimed at gaining unauthorized access to, manipulating, denying, disrupting, degrading, or destroying the target syste...
- AI-Assisted Software Vulnerability Discovery
"A common element in offensive cyber operations involves the identification and exploitation of system vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access or control. Until recently, these activities required...