MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 53.04.01
Destabilising political impacts from AI systems
Category: Indirect AI contributions to existential risks
Description
"(e.g., polarization, legitimacy of elections), international political economy, or international security196 in terms of the balance of power, technology races and international stability, and the speed and character of war"
From Advancing AI Governance: A Literature Review of Problems, Options, and Proposals (Maas2023), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Subdomain
- 6.4 Competitive dynamics
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: AI developers or state-like actors competing in an AI ‘race’ by rapidly developing, deploying, and applying AI systems to maximize strategic or economic advantage, increasing the risk they release unsafe and error-prone systems.
Real-world incidents in this subdomain
- Korean Internet Portal Giant Naver Manipulated Shopping and Video Search Algorithms to Favor In-House Services
- Apple Tweaked App Store Ranking Algorithms, Allegedly Resulted in Demotion of Local Apps in China
- Inefficiencies in the United States Resident Matching Program
How other frameworks describe this risk
Other entries from Maas2023
- Alignment failures in existing ML systems
- Faulty reward functions in the wild
- Specification gaming
- Reward model overoptimization
- Instrumental convergence
- Goal misgeneralization
- Inner misalignment
- Language model misalignment
- Harms from increasingly agentic algorithmic systems
- Dangerous capabilities in AI systems
- Situational awareness
- Acquisition of a goal to harm society