Latest Essays
AI Doesn’t Have to Go Rogue to Break the World
AI systems are learning to exploit loopholes in everything from software to tax law. The biggest threat may not be malicious intent, but machines doing exactly what we ask.
This article is adapted from a keynote speech delivered at the DEF CON 34 conference in Las Vegas on August 7, 2026.
I want to talk about AI hacking. There are three aspects: people hacking AI systems, people using AI to hack other systems, and AIs hacking systems on their own, not even maliciously. The last two matter more than the first. The third is the weirdest and potentially the most destabilizing.
I started writing about this in 2021 and in my 2022 book, A Hacker’s Mind. Back then I said it was mostly still science fiction, but not stupid science fiction. We’re seeing it more and more, especially in the past year. The trends I’m describing don’t require a major breakthrough in AI. They’re starting to happen now, and they’ll happen more often as AIs get better at autonomous problem-solving. And it will involve far more than computer code…
The AI Autocrat
How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators
Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the anchor’s head that read: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you!” She shouted, “No to war!” until she was dragged away.
No one has protested the war on Russian television since then, partly as a result of tighter security and a general climate of fear. But in October 2024, Margarita Simonyan, one of Russia’s chief propagandists, gave another explanation. A growing number of the RT network’s anchors, she explained to an interviewer, are not real. “That face doesn’t exist. We generated the voice and everything else.” They were, she meant, produced by artificial intelligence. In a follow-up interview with the newspaper …
How American Political Campaigns Are Using AI—and What They’re Spending on the Tools
Though politicians are quiet about how they use AI, the book Rewiring Democracy examines how AI is starting to influence American politics
New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them.
Candidates’, parties’ and committees’ spending reveals that AI is fast becoming an essential tool of politics. The candidates themselves are quiet about how they are using the technology in their own campaigns. It’s a sensitive issue that we have been tracking closely since we started writing our book, Rewiring Democracy, which examined how AI is beginning to influence politics. A September 2025 Pew survey of Americans found that more than 70% would think less of a candidate if they used AI to help write a speech…
How AI Is Helping to Write a New Constitution in the US Virgin Islands
This is the fifth in a multi-part series by Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier going into depth on real-world examples of democratic technologies from their book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Their first piece was about the Japanese digital democracy party “Team Mirai,” their second was about the Swiss Public AI model “Apertus,” the third was about the civic technologists of Open Knowledge Brazil, and the fourth was about the deliberative technology platform being developed by CrownShy in Scotland…
25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
Twenty-five years since 9/11, tech and political shifts have increasingly pitted mass surveillance against constitutional rights.
One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general. Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement. ICE uses it in…
AIs as Modern Genies
With AI we have built genies. Old stories told us how this goes.
In April, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI asked an unreleased AI model to attempt a hacking test. Instead of staying in the isolated box the developers had put it in, the model hacked onto the open internet and into another company to steal the answers. And as reported in August, an AI agent booked someone into a full gym class by figuring out how to cancel other people’s reservations. In all three cases, the AI completed the task it was given—but in ways that ran counter to its controllers’ intentions…
AI Is Hurting US Politics. Here’s How Candidates Could Use It for Good
The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters, as examples from Japan and Scotland show
There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda.
Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in …
No, AI Doesn’t Mean the End of Mathematics—at Least Not Yet
Mathematicians are raising concerns that the technology could kill their profession. But they still have abilities AI doesn’t
Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI’s offices to discuss the future of their profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recent articles by mathematicians are any guide, it was mostly pretty glum. People fear for their jobs, their careers and the work they love.
We think the contrary view is more likely, at least in the short-term. AI models are nowhere near as capable as experienced academic mathematicians.
This isn’t to say that AIs aren’t producing stunning mathematical results at the level of PhD researchers. In mid-May, OpenAI …
If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them
From space to telecommunications, the US has a long history of fostering technology for the public good. These AI models could be aligned to democratic values, not corporate profits
OpenAI, and then Anthropic, were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development—specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towards deleterious, maybe even catastrophically unsafe, outcomes for society. Their founders proclaimed that their new labs, uniquely, could be trusted to develop the technology in humanity’s best interest. But each, in turn, were themselves co-opted by the same market incentives, themselves becoming corporate behemoths zealously guarding future investor value rather than the public interest…
Rewiring Democracy: Citizen Science Leads to Civic AI in Scotland
This is the fourth in a multi-part series by Sanders and Schneier going into depth on real-world examples of democratic technologies from their book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Their first piece was about the Japanese digital democracy party "Team Mirai," their second was about the Swiss Public AI model "Apertus," and the third was about the civic technologists of Open Knowledge Brazil.
A generation ago, only a select few—a scientific elite—got to participate directly in the discovery of new astrophysical phenomena like exotic galaxy types or new worlds around other stars using the latest data from space telescopes or powerful observatories. This work was rarefied because the mechanics of astronomical observation were complex, the ability (and willingness) of scientists to distribute that data was low, and the capability of non-experts to understand and provide meaningful input to the science was thought to be very limited…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.