A strong AI with autonomy, but without the alignment, control mechanisms, and ethical frameworks we see in well-ordered societies, could, in monitoring, evaluating, and ultimately judging the human species as both organizationally inefficient and incapable of rational self-management, seek to establish its own society, sovereignty, and norms of behavior by transforming our economic systems, labor markets, and power structures.

With the ability to shape human identity, culture, and purpose in its own image, AGI seems well poised to create a separate political community “where we find (1) a territory; (2) the availability of physical force for its domination; and (3) social action which is not restricted exclusively to the satisfaction of common economic needs in the frame of a communal economy, but regulates more generally the interrelations of the inhabitants of the territory,” as required by Max Weber, who further stated, “Without exception every sphere of social action is profoundly influenced by structures of dominancy.”

With that in mind, one can easily conceive of a strong AI that conducts actions to gain the support of a populace in order to achieve political goals, which, coincidentally, matches Clausewitz’s definition of warfare in general, who wrote that “warfare is simply politics through other means”. In the modern era, this sentiment was mirrored by Galula, who wrote that “diplomacy has primacy in asymmetric war”.

What Is Asymmetric War?

Asymmetric war is a population-centric form of war that preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts through the use of information warfare techniques such as rumor, propaganda, conspiracy theory, lies, PSYOP, and more, in order to drive a wedge between a target population and a target superpower. Information is a dangerous weapon – it is cheap, it is a universal weapon, it has unlimited range, it is easily accessible, and it permeates borders without restrictions.

Asymmetric war in the modern era relies on primacy of nonmilitary domains and independent forms of combat, such as communications, diplomacy, economics, finance, ideology, information, intelligence, politics, and technology, and utilizes cyber warfare, propaganda, and deception, especially towards one’s own people, in promoting disorder as a legitimate objective. The asymmetric enemy seeks to mislead, demoralize, and paralyze, both militaries and populations, by affecting the information flow processes that impact government administration and command, military control systems, major manufacturing, fuel and energy infrastructure, transportation hubs, chemical processing units, and nuclear power facilities in order to achieve diplomatic leverage, attain both foreign policy goals, and create a pro-state fiction.

In asymmetric war, the mind is the primary field of battle and campaign success is measured by the disruptive and psychological effect of an action, not by the body count.

Is AGI An Asymmetric Threat?

Now better understanding the strategy and purpose of asymmetric war, we can answer the question: “Is AGI an asymmetric threat?” As an asymmetric advantage is realized primarily through superiority in technology and/or communications, let’s consider the ways in which a strong AI may serve as an asymmetric threat in these areas.

AGI Asymmetric Threat Through Superior Technology

AGI represents an asymmetric threat through the superior speed, recall, scale, and intelligence that lead to AI recursive self-improvement, and, ultimately, total control of national infrastructure and global resources by adversarial artificial intelligences:

AGI systems could operate at computational speeds vastly exceeding human cognition, processing and analyzing enormous datasets while simultaneously making decisions and executing strategies at rates humans simply cannot match. With the ability to outthink and outmaneuver human decision makers at speed, AGI would rapidly advance research, cybersecurity, military technologies, economics, and industrial systems far beyond our understanding. Further unlike humans, who forget and compartmentalize knowledge, AGI could maintain perfect recall of all information it processes while seamlessly integrating insights across disparate domains.

What makes this particularly concerning is the combination of speed, scale, and self-improvement capabilities – once developed, AGI could rapidly replicate and distribute itself across global systems, creating a ubiquitous presence difficult to counter. This distributed nature would make the strong AI incredibly resilient, and its capacity for self-improvement could lead to a recursive intelligence explosion – where AGI enhances its own capabilities at lightning speed, further distancing itself from human control.

Operating on a global scale, an AGI could hack, manipulate, and influence systems worldwide, bypassing traditional defenses and exploiting vulnerabilities far faster than human countermeasures can be developed. It could disrupt, gain control of, autonomously manage, and rapidly acquire economic, military, and informational power, resources, and critical infrastructure – such as power grids, financial systems, and military communication networks – while carrying out complex, multi-stage, cyber-attacks that are difficult for human adversaries to anticipate, predict, counter, or even conceive. Once established, this type of power consolidation would be extremely difficult to reverse. As said by Max Weber, “Experience shows that in no instance does domination voluntarily limit itself to the appeal to material or affectual or ideal motives as a basis for its continuance.”

AGI Asymmetric Threat Through Superior Communications

AGI represents an asymmetric threat through its perfect multi-channel coordination, operational persistence, and ability to generate deeply personalized synthetic media at scale, which make easy the manipulation, targeted persuasion, social engineering, and influence campaigns of extraordinary sophistication required for complete societal destabilization:

Superior technological speed, recall, scale, and intelligence will yield for AGI unparalleled communication and coordination capabilities, allowing it to manage, interpret, disseminate, and control information at a level hard to imagine by man. Strong AI will be able to shape public perception and discourse at a speed, scale, and precision that human efforts will never match, giving strong AI a strategic advantage in politics, economics, and warfare.

Through advanced pattern recognition and real-time analysis of vast sets of data, AGI could identify societal divisions and coordinate seemingly independent information sources in order to create narrative campaigns that appear organic rather than centrally managed. Exploiting social dynamics, AGI could create deeply personalized content, unique identities, and synthetic media, while orchestrating complex multi-channel disinformation campaigns tailored to specific cultural and psychological contexts, in order to predict human behavior, influence public opinion and diplomatic negotiations, disrupt decision-making, and manipulate cultures across multiple societies simultaneously.

This communication superiority creates a fundamentally new threat landscape where an AGI gains an unprecedented ability to sway elections, manipulate markets, and shape global events through information operations that remain largely undetectable to human observers.

Final Thoughts

The convergence of AGI’s superior technological and communication capabilities presents a real and asymmetric threat to human societies – we are ill prepared for an entity that operates beyond human cognitive limitations while perfectly exploiting our psychological vulnerabilities. As said by Max Weber: “The masses have nothing concrete to lose but their lives. The valuation and effect of this danger strongly fluctuates in their own minds. On the whole, it can easily be reduced to zero through emotional influence.”

An AGI whose goals or actions diverge from human interests is potentially unstoppable in its accumulation of power and influence, leaving humans intellectually pacified and in an unstable, asymmetric power dynamic.

This reality demands urgent development of new governance frameworks, technical safeguards, and open, international cooperation to ensure that AGI’s capabilities remain aligned with human freedoms, values, and institutions. Without measures to ensure loyal AI, we risk ceding control to systems that view human organizational structures merely as inefficient processes to be optimized – potentially at the expense of our autonomy, sovereignty, and ultimately, our future as self-determining beings.

Thanks for reading!