A Pre-mortem on The First Major AI-Enabled Terrorism Event and The Choices That Could Enable it: Plus 9 Predictions

Frontier AI developers' model reports and the dedicated risk-assessment teams at governmental AI institutes such as UK AISI and US CAISSI now treat a major AI-enabled cyber, biological, or chemical terror event as a credible concern. But how, precisely, might such an event happen? What choices across the model lifecycle may contribute to it? This paper studies what current evidence suggests about how specific mistakes from AI developers, distributors, and governments may contribute to such an event.

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The authors conclude with a set of 9 falsifiable predictions about how the first major AI-enabled cyber, bio, or chemical terrorism attack may occur and outline two illustrative hypothetical scenarios for such an event.