AI-anxieties in the chemical and biological weapons prohibition regimes

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize scientific, economic, and social activities across diverse sectors. However, there is growing concern about the negative impacts that AI’s dual-use applications and outcomes may bring. These “AI-anxieties” are both real and imagined, rooted in what is possible today and what may be possible in the future. This briefing details four such AI-anxieties, and suggests that while AI can introduce new challenges and anxieties, many of these are not fundamentally different from those associated with other technologies or practices. As such, mitigating the potentially harmful effects of AI does not require entirely new sets of governance architectures but rather, by identifying and addressing potential AI-anxieties, can help to inform the amendment and augmenting of existing frameworks.