Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Weapons

As cyber weapons and artificial intelligence technologies share the same technological foundation of bits and bytes, there is a strong trend of connecting both, thus addressing the imminent challenge of cyber weapons of processing, filtering and aggregating huge amounts of digital data in real time into decisions and actions. This chapter (This chapter is based on the chapter “Cyber Weapons and Artificial Intelligence: Impact, Influence and the Challenges for Arms Control” by Thomas Reinhold and Christian Reuter, published in 2022 in “Armament, Arms Control and Artificial Intelligence: The Janus-faced Nature of Machine Learning in the Military Realm” by Thomas Reinhold and Niklas Schörnig (Editors).) will analyse this development and highlight the increasing tendency towards artificial intelligence enabled autonomous decisions in defensive as well as offensive cyber weapons, the arising additional challenges for attributing cyber attacks and the problems for developing arms control measures for this technology fusion. However, the chapter also ventures an outlook how artificial intelligence methods can help to mitigate these challenges if applied for arms control measures itself.