Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: 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 increasing vulnerabilities in democratic processes worldwide, we urge a three-pronged response: (1) platform-side defenses—always-on swarm-detection dashboards, pre-election highfidelity 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 AI Influence Observatory.
Source: Science
Authors: Daniel Thilo Schroeder, Meeyoung Cha, Andrea Baronchelli, Nick Bostrom, Nicholas A. Christakis, David Garcia, Amit Goldenberg, Yara Kyrychenko, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Nina Lutz, Gary Marcus, Filippo Menczer, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand, Maria Ressa, Frank Schweitzer, Dawn Song, Christopher Summerfield, Audrey Tang, Jay J. Van Bavel, Sander van der Linden, Jonas R. Kunst
Institutions: SINTEF Digital, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, City St George's, University of London, Yale University, University of Konstanz, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, University of British Columbia, University of Washington, New York University, Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana University, Cornell University, Columbia University, ETH Zurich, University of California, Berkeley, University of Oxford, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norwegian School of Economics, BI Norwegian Business School
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7125492504