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How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy

Published: May 18, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2506.06299v2

By: Daniel Thilo Schroeder , Meeyoung Cha , Andrea Baronchelli and more

Potential Business Impact:

AI swarms spread fake news and trick people.

Business Areas:

Intelligent Systems Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Science and Engineering

Advances in AI portend a new era of sophisticated disinformation operations. While individual AI systems already create convincing -- and at times misleading -- information, an imminent development is the emergence of malicious AI swarms. These systems can coordinate covertly, infiltrate communities, evade traditional detectors, and run continuous A/B tests, with round-the-clock persistence. The result can include fabricated grassroots consensus, fragmented shared reality, mass harassment, voter micro-suppression or mobilization, contamination of AI training data, and erosion of institutional trust. With democratic processes worldwide increasingly vulnerable, we urge a three-pronged response: (1) platform-side defenses -- always-on swarm-detection dashboards, pre-election high-fidelity swarm-simulation stress-tests, transparency audits, and optional client-side "AI shields" for users; (2) model-side safeguards -- standardized persuasion-risk tests, provenance-authenticating passkeys, and watermarking; and (3) system-level oversight -- a UN-backed AI Influence Observatory.