6.4Competitive dynamics

01.04.00Type 4: Willful indifference

As a side effect of a primary goal like profit or influence, AI creators can willfully allow it to cause widespread societal harms like pollution, resource depletion, mental illness, misinformation, or injustice.

08.03.00Development of unsafe AGI

"The risks associated with the race to develop the first AGI, including the development of poor quality and unsafe AGI, and heightened political and control issues."

14.08.00Technological Maturity

"The technological maturity level describes how mature and error-free a certain technology is in a certain application context. If new technologies with a lower level of maturity are used in the development of the AI system, they may contain risks that are still unknown or difficult to assess.Mature technologies, on the other hand, usually have a greater variety of empirical data available, which means that risks can be identified and assessed more easily. However, with mature technologies, there is a risk that risk awareness decreases over time"

19.05.07Technological arms race with autonomous weapons

22.02.00AI Race (Environmental/Structural)

"The immense potential of AIs has created competitive pressures among global players contending for power and influence. This “AI race” is driven by nations and corporations who feel they must rapidly build and deploy AIs to secure their positions and survive."

22.02.01Military AI Arms Race

"The development of AIs for military applications is swiftly paving the way for a new era in military technology, with potential consequences rivaling those of gunpowder and nuclear arms in what has been described as the “third revolution in warfare.”

22.02.02Corporate AI Race

"Although competition between companies can be beneficial, creating more useful products for consumers, there are also pitfalls. First, the benefits of economic activity may be unevenly distributed, incentivizing those who benefit most from it to disregard the harms to others. Second, under intense market competition, businesses tend to focus much more on short-term gains than on long-term outcomes. With this mindset, companies often pursue something that can make a lot of profit in the short term, even if it poses a societal risk in the long term."

45.01.13Risks from AI systems (Risks of supply chain security)

"The AI industry relies on a highly globalized supply chain. However, certain countries may use unilateral coercive measures, such as technology barriers and export restrictions, to create development obstacles and maliciously disrupt the global AI supply chain. This can lead to significant risks of supply disruptions for chips, software, and tools."

47.01.06Opacity (industry opacity)

"Opacity is not solely due to the technological complexity that limits developers’ and users’ understanding of how generative models function on a technical level. It is further exacerbated by the practices of organizations and companies that are advancing the field. Many are private companies that choose to withhold from the public many of the precise characteristics of their most advanced models."

50.03.06Economic harm (Unfair Market Practices)

53.04.01Destabilising political impacts from AI systems

"(e.g., polarization, legitimacy of elections), international political economy, or international security196 in terms of the balance of power, technology races and international stability, and the speed and character of war"

55.02.00Worsened conflict

"Cooperation and conflict: we’re seeing more focus and investment on the kinds of AI capabilities that make conflict more likely and severe, rather than those likely to improve cooperation. So, on our current trajectory, AI seems more likely to have negative long-term impacts in this area."

55.02.04Resource conflicts driven by AI development

"AI development may itself become a new flash point for conflicts—causing more conflict to occur— especially conflicts over AI-relevant resources (such as data centres, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and raw materials)."

58.05.05Increased competition

"Increased competition - The inappropriate or unethical use of technology to gain market share."

61.01.12Security

"The international and national security threats, including cyber warfare, arms races, and geopolitical instability."

61.02.17Dangerous development races

"Competitive pressures could lead to the neglect of safety measures in AI development."

61.02.26Geopolitical competition for superiority

"Strategic competition between nations over AI capabilities could heighten global tensions and destabilize international relations."

61.02.27High-speed AI operations

"The fast operational speed of AI models and systems in competitive environments can lead to errors that are difficult to detect and correct in time."

62.29.03Competitive pressures in GPAI product release

"In competitive situations, developers of general-purpose AI systems might cut corners on the safety evaluation of their GPAI model and instead spend more time and effort on the capabilities of those systems [183, 69]. This is especially dangerous if the capabilities of such AI systems are correlated with the risk they pose [162]."

68.06.00Geopolitical risk

"As AI is increasingly seen as a powerful technology, countries are racing to develop it ahead of their geopolitical rivals, a competition that could lead to geopolitical tensions [138], [139]... The emphasis of this risk is on harms that result from second-order effects, where geopolitical instabilities result from the race to develop AI, rather than on the direct consequences of the deployment or use of AI itself."