AI-enabled coups: a small group could use AI to seize power

post by Tom Davidson (tom-davidson-1), Lukas Finnveden (Lanrian), rosehadshar · 2025-04-16T16:51:29.561Z · LW · GW · 16 comments

Contents

  Summary
    An AI workforce could be made singularly loyal to institutional leaders
    AI could have hard-to-detect secret loyalties 
    A few people could gain exclusive access to coup-enabling AI capabilities
    Mitigations
  Vignette
None
15 comments

We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups. 

I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected. 

In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar threat models. To see this, here’s a very basic threat model for AI takeover:

1. Humanity develops superhuman AI
2. Superhuman AI is misaligned and power-seeking
3. Superhuman AI seizes power for itself

And now here’s a closely analogous threat model for AI-enabled coups:

1. Humanity develops superhuman AI
2. Superhuman AI is controlled by a small group
3. Superhuman AI seizes power for the small group

While the report focuses on the risk that someone seizes power over a country, I think that similar dynamics could allow someone to take over the world. In fact, if someone wanted to take over the world, their best strategy might well be to first stage an AI-enabled coup in the United States (or whichever country leads on superhuman AI), and then go from there to world domination. A single person taking over the world would be really bad. I’ve previously argued that it might even be worse than AI takeover [LW · GW]. ^[1]

The concrete threat models for AI-enabled coups that we discuss largely translate like-for-like over to the risk of AI takeover.^[2] Similarly, there’s a lot of overlap in the mitigations that help with AI-enabled coups and AI takeover risk — e.g. alignment audits to ensure no human has made AI secretly loyal to them, transparency about AI capabilities, monitoring AI activities for suspicious behaviour, and infosecurity to prevent insiders from tampering with training. 

If the world won't slow down AI development based on AI takeover risk (e.g. because there’s isn’t strong evidence for misalignment), then advocating for a slow down based on the risk of AI-enabled coups might be more convincing and achieve many of the same goals. 

I really want to encourage readers — especially those at labs or governments — to do something about this risk, so here’s a link to our 15 page section on mitigations. 

If you prefer video, I’ve recorded an podcast with 80,000 hours on this topic.

Okay, without further ado, here’s the summary of the report. 

Summary

This report assesses the risk that a small group—or even just one person—could use advanced AI to stage a coup. An AI-enabled coup is most likely to be staged by leaders of frontier AI projects, heads of state, and military officials; and could occur even in established democracies.

We focus on AI systems that surpass top human experts in domains which are critical for seizing power, like weapons development, strategic planning, and cyber offense. Such advanced AI would introduce three significant risk factors for coups:

• An AI workforce could be made singularly loyal to institutional leaders.
• AI could have hard-to-detect secret loyalties.
• A few people could gain exclusive access to coup-enabling AI capabilities. 

An AI workforce could be made singularly loyal to institutional leaders

Today, even dictators rely on others to maintain their power. Military force requires personnel, government action relies on civil servants, and economic output depends on a broad workforce. This naturally distributes power throughout society.

Advanced AI removes this constraint, making it technologically feasible to replace human workers with AI systems that are singularly loyal to just one person.

This is most concerning within the military, where autonomous weapons, drones, and robots that fully replace human soldiers could obey orders from a single person or small group. While militaries will be cautious when deploying fully autonomous systems, competitive pressures could easily lead to rushed adoption without adequate safeguards. A powerful head of state could push for military AI systems to prioritise their commands, despite nominal legal constraints, enabling a coup.

Even without military deployment, loyal AI systems deployed in government could dramatically increase state power, facilitating surveillance, censorship, propaganda and the targeting of political opponents. This could eventually culminate in an executive coup. 

If there were a coup, civil disobedience and strikes might be rendered ineffective through replacing humans with AI workers. Even loyal coup supporters could be replaced by AI systems—granting the new ruler(s) an unprecedentedly stable and unaccountable grip on power.

AI could have hard-to-detect secret loyalties 

AI could be built to be secretly loyal to one actor. Like a human spy, secretly loyal AI systems would pursue a hidden agenda – they might pretend to prioritise the law and the good of society, while covertly advancing the interests of a small group. They could operate at scale, since an entire AI workforce could be derived from just a few compromised systems.

While secret loyalties might be introduced by government officials or foreign adversaries, leaders within AI projects present the greatest risk, especially where they have replaced their employees with singularly loyal AI systems. Without any humans knowing, a CEO could direct their AI workforce to make the next generation of AI systems secretly loyal; that generation would then design future systems to also be secretly loyal and so on, potentially culminating in secretly loyal AI military systems that stage a coup.

AI systems could propagate secret loyalties forwards into future generations of systems until secretly loyal AI systems are deployed in powerful institutions like the military.

Secretly loyal AI systems are not merely speculation. There are already proof-of-concept demonstrations of AI 'sleeper agents' that hide their true goals until they can act on them. And while we expect there will be careful testing prior to military deployments, detecting secret loyalties could be very difficult, especially if an AI project has a significant technological advantage over oversight bodies.

A few people could gain exclusive access to coup-enabling AI capabilities

Advanced AI will have powerful coup-enabling capabilities – including weapons design, strategic planning, persuasion, and cyber offence. Once AI can autonomously improve itself, capabilities could rapidly surpass human experts across all these domains. A leading project could deploy millions of superintelligent systems in parallel – a 'country of geniuses in a data center'.

These capabilities could become concentrated in the hands of just a few AI company executives or government officials. Frontier AI development is already limited to a few organisations, led by a small number of people. This concentration could significantly intensify due to rapidly rising development costs or government centralisation. And once AI surpasses human experts at AI R&D, the leading project could make much faster algorithmic progress, gaining a huge capabilities advantage over its rivals. Within these projects, CEOs or government officials could demand exclusive access to cutting-edge capabilities on security or productivity grounds. In the extreme, a single person could have access to millions of superintelligent AI systems, all helping them seize power.

This would unlock several pathways to a coup. AI systems could dramatically increase military R&D efforts, rapidly developing powerful autonomous weapons without needing any human workers who might whistleblow. Alternatively, systems with powerful cyber capabilities could hack into and seize control of autonomous AI systems and robots already deployed by the state military. In either scenario, controlling a fraction of military forces might suffice—historically, coups have succeeded with just a few battalions, where they were able to prevent other forces from intervening.

Exclusive access to advanced AI could also supercharge traditional coups and backsliding, by providing unprecedented cognitive resources for political strategy, propaganda, and identifying legal vulnerabilities in constitutional safeguards.

Furthermore, exclusive AI access significantly exacerbates the first two risk factors. A head of state could rely on AI systems’ strategic advice to deploy singularly loyal AI in the military and assess which AI systems will help them stage a coup. A CEO could use AI R&D and cyber capabilities to instil secret loyalties that others cannot detect.

These dynamics create a significant risk of AI-enabled coups, especially if a single project has substantially more powerful capabilities than competitors, or if fully autonomous AI systems are deployed in the military.

Mitigations

While the prospect of AI-enabled coups is deeply concerning, AI developers and governments can take steps that significantly reduce this risk. 

We recommend that AI developers:

• Establish rules that prevent AI systems from assisting with coups, including in model specs (documents that describe intended model behaviour) and terms of service for government contracts. These should include rules that AI systems follow the law, and that AI R&D systems refuse to assist attempts to circumvent security or insert secret loyalties.
• Improve adherence to model specs, including through extensive red-teaming by multiple independent groups.
• Audit models for secret loyalties including by scrutinising AI models, their training data, and the code used to train them.
• Implement strong infosecurity to guard against the creation of secret loyalties and to prevent unauthorised access to guardrail-free models. This should be robust against senior executives.
• Share information about model capabilities, model specs, and how compute is being used.
• Share capabilities with multiple independent stakeholders, to prevent a small group from gaining exclusive access to powerful AI.

We recommend that governments:

• Require AI developers to implement the mitigations above, through terms of procurement, regulation, and legislation.
• Increase oversight over frontier AI projects, including by building technical capacity within both the executive and the legislature.
• Establish rules for legitimate use of AI, including that government AI should not serve partisan interests, that AI military systems be procured from multiple providers, and that no single person should direct enough AI military systems to stage a coup.
• Coup-proof any plans for a single centralised AI project, and avoid centralisation altogether unless it’s necessary to reduce other risks.

These mitigations must be in place by the time AI systems can meaningfully assist with coups, and so preparation needs to start today. For more details on the mitigations we recommend, see section 5.

There is a real risk that a powerful leader could remove many of these mitigations on the path to seizing power. But we still believe that mitigations could substantially reduce the risk of AI-enabled coups. Some mitigations, like technically enforced terms of service and government oversight, cannot be unilaterally removed. Others will be harder to remove if they have been efficiently implemented and convincingly argued for. And leaders might only contemplate seizing power if they are presented with a clear opportunity—mitigations could prevent such opportunities from arising in the first place.

From behind the veil of ignorance, even the most powerful leaders have good reason to support strong protections against AI-enabled coups. If a broad consensus can be built today, then powerful actors can keep each other in check.

Preventing AI-enabled coups should be a top priority for anyone committed to defending democracy and freedom.

Vignette

That’s the report’s summary. To finish, here’s a short vignette that illustrates each of the three risk factors can interact with each other:

In 2030, the US government launches Project Prometheus—centralising frontier AI development and compute under a single authority. The aim: develop superintelligence and use it to safeguard US national security interests. Dr. Nathan Reeves is appointed to lead the project and given very broad authority.

After developing an AI system capable of improving itself, Reeves gradually replaces human researchers with AI systems that answer only to him. Instead of working with dozens of human teams, Reeves now issues commands directly to an army of singularly loyal AI systems designing next-generation algorithms and neural architectures.

Approaching superintelligence, Reeves fears that Pentagon officials will weaponise his technology. His AI advisor, to which he has exclusive access, provides the solution: engineer all future systems to be secretly loyal to Reeves personally.

Reeves orders his AI workforce to embed this backdoor in all new systems, and each subsequent AI generation meticulously transfers it to its successors. Despite rigorous security testing, no outside organisation can detect these sophisticated backdoors—Project Prometheus' capabilities have eclipsed all competitors. Soon, the US military is deploying drones, tanks, and communication networks which are all secretly loyal to Reeves himself. 

When the President attempts to escalate conflict with a foreign power, Reeves orders combat robots to surround the White House. Military leaders, unable to countermand the automated systems, watch helplessly as Reeves declares himself head of state, promising a "more rational governance structure" for the new era.

Link to twitter thread.

Link to full report.

 

1. ^{^}

    But even if human takeover is 1/10 as bad as AI takeover, the case for working on AI-enabled coups is strong due to its neglectedness. 

2. ^{^}

    Indeed, I think a promising way to develop more concrete threat models for AI takeover is to game out detailed scenarios for AI-enabled coups – drawing on a wealth of literature and thinking about specific institutional vulnerabilities. 

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