Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Strategic Stability

Abstract: How will advances in artificial intelligence impact strategic stability? A growing number of studies and reports assessing the ways that advances in AI could influence global politics focus on the potential risks to strategic stability from integration of AI into the nuclear domain, particularly in large language models and frontier AI. These risks come from multiple potential sources, including miscalculation by machines, sidestepping of human firebreaks to escalation, AI-induced accidents, the speed of AI-enabled warfare, and other mechanisms. The relationship between AI integration and strategic stability may change over time as knowledge and experience with AI systems increases, thus decreasing the likelihood of automation bias, but fundamentally the relationship will depend on second-strike capabilities. While there is inherent uncertainty, since we are still early in the age of AI, at this point it appears as though the higher the confidence nuclear-armed states have in their second-strike capabilities, the lower the probability that they integrate AI in dangerous ways that make escalation at machine speed more likely, and vice versa.