Security

This study investigates how LLMs can be used for spear phishing, a form of cybercrime that involves manipulating targets into divulging sensitive information. It first explores LLMs’ ability to assist with the reconnaissance...

The study of international races has focused almost exclusively on security motivations for competitive arming. But international races may also be motivated by prestige. This article defines a “prestige race” and outlines the...

Out of the wreckage of the Second World War, the UK transformed itself. It rebuilt its shattered economy. It founded the NHS. It created national insurance. And it helped establish international institutions like the United...

Major theories of military innovation focus on relatively narrow technological developments, such as nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers. Arguably the most profound military implications of technological change, however, come...

What resources and technologies are strategic? Policy and theoretical debates often focus on this question, since the “strategic” designation yields valuable resources and elevated attention. The ambiguity of the very concept...

A large literature has argued that offensive advantage makes states worse off because it can induce a security dilemma, preemption, costly conflict, and arms races. We argue instead that state welfare is u-shaped under...

Historically, progress in the field of cryptography has been enormously consequential. Over the past century, for instance, cryptographic discoveries have played a key role in a world war and made it possible to use the internet..

To help humanity solve fundamental problems of cooperation, scientists need to reconceive artificial intelligence as deeply social. Artificial-intelligence assistants and recommendation algorithms interact with billions of peop...

Many socially valuable activities depend on sensitive information, such as medical research, public health policies, political coordination, and personalized digital services. This is often posed a...

Biology can be misused, and the risk of this causing widespread harm increases in step with the rapid march of technological progress. A key security challenge involves attribution: determining, in...

Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women: across a variety of contexts, women generally prefer more peaceful options and are less supportive of making threats and initiating...

Advances in AI are likely to be among the most impactful global developments in the coming decades, and that AI governance will become among the most important global issue areas. AI governance is ...

Governments around the world are busy talking about the critical next steps — how to keep people safe from the coronavirus as economies start to reopen. In the United States and in Europe, this involves officials looking at how...

Many researchers work on improving the data efficiency of machine learning. What would happen if they succeed?This paper explores the social-economic impact of increased data efficiency. Specifical...

There is growing concern over the potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Publishing scientific research can facilitate misuse of the technology, but the research can also contri...

Governments across the globe have been quick to adapt developments in artificial intelligence to military technologies. Prominent among the many changes recently introduced, autonomous weapon systems pose important new...

We ask how the offense-defense balance scales, meaning how it changes as investments into a conflict increase. To do so we offer a general formalization of the offense-defense balance in terms of c...

Any technology as potent as AI will also bring new risks, and it is encouraging that many of today’s AI policy initiatives include risk mitigation as part of their mandate. Before risks can be miti...

The idea of an artificial intelligence (AI) arms race between China and the United States is ubiquitous. Before 2016, there were fewer than 300 Google results for “AI arms race” and only a handful of articles that mentioned the...

This syllabus covers material located at the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI) and international security. The syllabus can be used in structured self-study (or group-study) for tho...

This report was written by researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, OpenAI, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for a New American S...

This paper attempts a preliminary analysis of the global desirability of different forms of openness in AI development (including openness about source code, science, data, safety techniques, capab...