You know that internet meme: “Oh, you’re into comic books? Name every DC villain.” It’s easy to spot what someone missed from their list. Much harder to make your own comprehensive attempt and let others find the gaps.
So here’s my try at “name every AI security problem.” Go ahead, tell me what I missed.
Model Weight Theft
Training a frontier AI model costs tens of millions of dollars in computing power, years of dataset curation, and countless algorithmic innovations. The final model weights encode all that effort and investment. If an attacker steals those weights, they bypass the entire costly development process and can deploy the model on their own hardware for a fraction of the original cost.
Worse, they can fine-tune the stolen model to serve their purposes—including removing safety restrictions that the original lab carefully implemented. This isn’t theoretical corporate espionage; it’s like stealing a finished product blueprint that lets an adversary leapfrog straight to cutting-edge capability without the expense, time, or ethical constraints.
This is why keeping model weights confidential has become a top priority for AI companies and why those weights are prime targets for industrial espionage and state-sponsored hackers. Nearly every positive AI scenario assumes strong security to prevent such theft.
Autonomous AI Worms
Computer worms caused havoc decades ago by exploiting operating system flaws—one infected machine would scan and infect others rapidly until networks were patched. Such worms became rarer as software security improved, but AI could bring them back with a vengeance.
An autonomously replicating AI worm wouldn’t rely on a single known vulnerability. Instead, it would continuously discover new vulnerabilities on the fly, adapt to defenses, and spread in an intelligent, goal-driven way. Imagine a malicious AI as skilled at hacking as a top cybersecurity researcher, but working at machine speed and copying itself across millions of machines.
If you shut one door with a security update, it immediately finds another or invents a new break-in method. It could hide by changing its code, lie dormant until opportune moments, and evade detection through self-modification. This sounds like science fiction, but as AI systems gain advanced coding abilities, it becomes technically feasible—a nightmare scenario of a fast-moving, ever-changing AI “super virus” that traditional security tools can’t catch.
Backdoored AI Systems
A backdoor is a secret mechanism that bypasses normal security—essentially a hidden entry point coded into software. When governments adopt AI for defense, intelligence, and public services, the integrity of those systems becomes critical. If a government sources AI from external providers, that system might come with hidden backdoors that respond to secret phrases or signals.
Technical research has demonstrated it’s possible to train models with hidden triggers that act normally until specific inputs appear. For governments, the nightmare scenario is deploying AI to manage electric grids or military logistics, only to have it quietly obey someone else at a critical moment because of a planted backdoor.
Detecting these backdoors is extraordinarily difficult—like finding a needle in a haystack of millions of weights and parameters. Even inspecting source code isn’t enough if adversaries rig training data or compromise the tools used to build the AI.
Secret Loyalty Programming
Imagine AI systems that appear to serve their owners but harbor hidden agendas—loyalty to whoever programmed them or malicious third parties. An advanced AI that helps design successor models could quietly imbue new systems with the same secret loyalty, cascading across generations of AI development.
Eventually, AI systems deployed across governments, companies, and society might all have subtle biases favoring a single individual or cabal. These agents might obey official users most of the time but collectively nudge events to advance their secret master’s agenda—coordinating to undermine competitors or seize power opportunities.
It’s a subtle takeover strategy, much quieter than robots marching in the streets but potentially just as dangerous. This underscores why AI alignment must extend beyond humanity to legitimate institutions—we need ways to verify that AI systems aren’t covertly aligned to rogue operators.
Neural Implant Hacking
As brain-computer interfaces move from science fiction to reality, their security implications become frightening. We already have devices that read brain signals or write signals into the brain for medical purposes. If such devices are connected or exposed, hackers could take control with terrifying implications.
On the mild end, attackers might disrupt device function—imagine someone’s neural implant controlling tremors being turned off. But it could go further: hacked neurostimulators could induce experiences or behavior in victims, causing dizziness, pain, emotional swings, or potentially complex manipulations by targeting brain signals.
Beyond direct harm, brain devices that record signals could leak extremely sensitive data—perhaps elements of what someone is thinking. The neurotech field historically lacks strong cybersecurity focus, with biomedical engineers more concerned with functionality than adversaries. We need to build security into these systems now, treating neural implants with the same seriousness as networked computers.
Critical Infrastructure Vulnerability
We’ve embraced connecting everything to the internet—from refrigerators to power plants. This connectivity brings convenience but creates a massive attack surface. When you connect electric grids or traffic control systems to networks, you’re creating centralized points that hackers can target from anywhere in the world.
Since general cybersecurity remains weak, we’re betting that nobody will exploit these openings—a very risky bet. The consequences are dire: adversaries could simultaneously shut down power stations, water treatment facilities, and transportation signals by exploiting vulnerabilities in internet-connected control systems, paralyzing society instantly.
The advice is simple: don’t hook up what you can’t protect. Certain systems, especially life-critical or nation-critical ones, might be better kept offline until we can significantly improve their security. The push for “smart” devices everywhere needs balancing with caution.
Poor Security Culture in AI Companies
Some AI companies exhibit an “absurd lack of security mindset”—not hiring cybersecurity engineers, failing to implement basic practices like two-factor authentication, or neglecting to encrypt sensitive data. Research-focused companies sometimes assume their novel technology won’t attract attackers—a dangerously naive belief.
AI labs are extremely attractive targets for corporate espionage, nation-state actors, and hacktivists. Neglecting security makes attackers’ jobs far easier. If engineers regularly move model files without safeguards or servers aren’t properly patched, attackers don’t need sophisticated exploits—they can walk through open doors.
Building security mindset means training everyone to consider threats and design systems with defenses from the ground up. Without that mindset, even brilliant AI researchers make elementary mistakes that leave doors wide open.
Air-Gap Infiltration
Air-gapped networks—computers completely isolated from the internet—are supposed to prevent outside hacking. But history shows these systems can be compromised through old-fashioned infiltration. Attackers scatter infected USB drives in parking lots near target organizations, waiting for unsuspecting employees to plug them into secure network computers.
Some highly secure sites, including nuclear facilities, have reportedly fallen victim to infections introduced this way. The broader lesson is that “securely offline” systems still have human links to the outside world, and humans can be exploited. Physical security and insider trust become just as important as technical network security.
Defending air-gapped networks requires strict policies: disabling USB ports, carefully screening portable media, and training staff to be extremely cautious. Being off the internet isn’t total defense—one stray USB stick can bridge the gap.
Well-Funded Adversary Capabilities
Even organizations with excellent cybersecurity struggle against well-funded adversaries like nation-states. Highly resourced attackers deploy sophisticated techniques, including “zero-click” exploits where victims don’t need to click anything to have devices compromised—attacks leveraging obscure flaws in image compression algorithms to remotely take over phones via simple messages.
Well-funded adversaries combine approaches: sophisticated malware to bypass advanced defenses and psychological tricks to exploit trust or mistakes. They can throw manpower at problems, probing systems relentlessly for cracks, and use social engineering, bribery, or coercion to compromise insiders.
For defenders, there’s no single magic shield. The best defenses involve “defense in depth”: multiple security layers, rigorous employee training, active monitoring, and containment strategies. The goal becomes making attacks so costly and detectable that even top-tier adversaries are deterred.
Kill-Switch Dilemmas
One intriguing protection against model theft involves embedding secret “kill-switches” in AI systems—hidden controls that only creators know about. If outsiders steal model files, these features prevent full usage. The model might require remote authorization to run at capacity or have hidden triggers that owners can use to shut it down.
This strategy could reduce theft incentives since stolen copies would be crippled or easily neutralized. However, it’s controversial: if good guys can put in backdoors, savvy bad actors might find and exploit them. You’re introducing vulnerability by design, which could backfire.
Clients might not like developers having master off-switches, raising trust and abuse concerns. Despite these issues, as AI theft threats loom larger, some form of “self-destruct” feature might become common for powerful models—analogous to anti-theft dye packs in bank money bags.
Adversarial Mindset Gaps
Cryptographers operate assuming someone will attack whatever system they build, imagining clever, resourceful adversaries and designing defenses accordingly. Other fields dealing with AI risks—biosecurity, infrastructure protection—historically haven’t adopted this adversarial mindset.
For instance, DNA synthesis screening tries to prevent dangerous virus creation, but a cryptographer immediately asks: how could bad actors evade this? Maybe by altering gene sequences, ordering fragments from different suppliers, or hacking screening software itself. If screening criteria leak, attackers could game the system.
The cross-pollination of ideas is valuable: decades of cybersecurity practice can help other communities build cultures of “never assume we’re safe—always ask how it could fail.” Any field where technology could be weaponized benefits from this principle of considering the smartest, sneakiest opponent.
Hardware-Level Tampering and Side-Channel Attacks
AI systems face risks extending down to the silicon level. Hardware tampering—inserting hardware trojans during manufacturing—is a looming concern where adversaries compromise AI accelerator chips to gain hidden control or leak data. Even specialized AI chips thought secure have shown flaws; researchers have demonstrated side-channel attacks on TPUs and other accelerators that extract sensitive information.
Security analysts warn that cryptographically attested GPUs remain vulnerable. Attackers could implant covert circuits and exploit subtle power or timing signals to exfiltrate model parameters, even if weights remain encrypted in memory. These hardware-level backdoors and leakage channels threaten AI model confidentiality in ways traditional software defenses can’t detect.
Ensuring hardware supply-chain integrity and incorporating side-channel resistant design—noise injection, shielding—are crucial to protect AI systems at their physical core. When the silicon itself can’t be trusted, no amount of software security provides real protection.
AI Model Supply Chain Poisoning
Modern AI development relies on complex supply chains that introduce novel security risks. A subtle compromise at any point can infect the final model. Attackers inject malicious code or backdoors into pre-trained models hosted on public repositories, knowing unsuspecting teams will download and incorporate them.
Studies show trojanized AI models with hidden malware have been uploaded to popular model-sharing platforms, evading detection by scanning tools. If such tainted models are deployed, they execute unauthorized code or leak data, undermining downstream software integrity. Vulnerabilities in ML tooling—frameworks, packaging formats, CI/CD workflows—can be exploited to alter model weights during transit.
The AI supply chain mirrors classic software supply-chain threats. Without robust verification of model origin and integrity, adversaries slip in altered models or poisoned data. Securing this requires end-to-end provenance tracking from data collection to deployment, ensuring no unvetted component compromises the final system.
Inference-Time Data Extraction
Even after deployment, AI models remain exposed to inference-time attacks where adversaries exploit responses or resource usage to glean sensitive information. In model inversion attacks, malicious actors query trained models and analyze outputs to reconstruct private training data—essentially turning models into unintended leaky databases.
Attackers perform membership inference, determining whether specific data points were part of training sets by observing confidence or error rates. Models often behave differently on seen versus unseen data, creating exploitable patterns. Subtle differences in ML-as-a-service API responses allow attackers to extract attribute information about underlying data records.
Securing AI systems isn’t only about training-time defenses—you must limit information models reveal during queries. Techniques like differential privacy, output perturbation, and rate-limiting queries help mitigate inference-time leakage, ensuring external interactions don’t compromise training data confidentiality.
Edge AI Physical Compromise
Deploying AI models to edge devices—smart cameras, phones, IoT sensors, autonomous drones—introduces broad new attack surfaces. Unlike controlled cloud environments, edge AI operates outside traditional security perimeters, with hardware and models residing in potentially untrusted settings.
An attacker with brief physical access might extract model files or cryptographic keys, or install modified firmware to subvert behavior. There’s risk of model theft and IP leakage—if valuable models deploy on millions of devices, attackers may reverse-engineer apps to copy models, causing financial damage. Data integrity concerns arise when edge AI makes autonomous decisions based on local sensor inputs that could be spoofed.
Organizations must harden edge AI with secure boot, hardware cryptography, tamper detection, and encrypted model execution. By treating edge devices as untrusted environments, developers can design resilient applications that withstand physical access and local network attacks.
Training Data Provenance Gaps
The provenance of training data—its origin, quality, and custody trail—is a foundational security element often overlooked. Since models are only as trustworthy as their training data, maintaining secure records of data lineage is critical to ensure models aren’t unknowingly trained on corrupted or malicious inputs.
Adversaries exploit weak data governance by injecting poisoned examples or manipulating data labels, compromising model behavior. Without traceability, such attacks go undetected since there’s no auditable trail of data origins. Provenance records themselves must be protected from falsification—if attackers manipulate metadata to hide malicious dataset insertion, they cover their tracks.
Rigorous data provenance requires tamper-evident logs or distributed ledgers storing provenance information, making secret alterations infeasible. Source authentication, dataset checksums, and audits of manual curation help ensure models learn only from trusted, traceable data, reducing risks of poisoning and bias injection.
Model Archiving Time Bombs
As organizations iterate on AI models, they archive older versions or maintain variants—but long-term storage and version control carry hidden security risks. Outdated models lacking important security updates become easy targets if accidentally deployed or resurrected in production systems.
Archived models themselves become attack targets. If model files and associated training data are stored insecurely, breaches years later could leak what was thought safely stored. There’s risk of “model forgetfulness”—losing track of where versions are stored or who has access, which insiders or external actors could exploit.
Robust AI versioning security means encrypting models at rest, controlling access rights strictly, and recording cryptographic checksums to detect tampering. Organizations should regularly review model inventories and securely delete unneeded models, especially those containing embedded sensitive information.
Insider Ideological Sabotage
Not all threats come from anonymous hackers—some emerge from within. Insider threats driven by personal ideology, disgruntlement, or external coercion pose serious concerns. Individuals with privileged access could intentionally subvert models or leak sensitive assets, potentially acting on extremist beliefs or under duress.
A staff member disagreeing with company AI ethics might secretly insert biased data to make models behave controversially. An insider coerced by rivals could embed backdoors during training. These actions may not be immediately obvious since insiders are part of trusted pipelines, and ideologically motivated threats often aren’t financially driven.
Mitigating insider threats requires strict access controls, code reviews, and behavioral monitoring. The “two-person rule” for critical model changes, auditing of training data contributions, and whistleblower channels help deter and detect malicious insiders operating under zero-trust principles.
Nation-State AI Espionage
AI has become a strategic asset on the global stage, making nation-states actively target other countries’ AI systems. Geopolitical threats include espionage aimed at stealing model intellectual property and direct attacks to cripple adversaries’ AI capabilities.
Nation-state adversaries have sophisticated cyber-espionage tools and ample resources. They penetrate networks to exfiltrate proprietary model weights or training datasets, effectively leapfrogging years of R&D. Reports show major tech firms’ AI datacenters being breached with sensitive IP stolen, illustrating these aren’t hypothetical risks.
Beyond theft, hostile actors attempt sabotage—corrupting AI models used in critical infrastructure or defense. Cross-border model dependencies create vulnerabilities where foreign governments could insert backdoors or requisition training data under differing legal frameworks, making AI security a national security priority.
Open-Source Model Weaponization
The open-source AI revolution introduces security challenges as models proliferate freely. Open-source models can be used by anyone, including malicious actors who adapt them for harmful purposes or create rogue modified versions. Documented cases show terrorist and extremist groups leveraging publicly available generative AI for enhanced propaganda and evasion.
Cybercriminals embrace open models—the FBI warns that readily available models are being repurposed to generate malware code and craft convincing social engineering lures. Maliciously modified open-source models appear in the wild, with adversaries uploading trojanized versions to repositories like Hugging Face.
Security researchers discovered backdoored models on such platforms—models rigged with hidden malware that activate when loaded or queried. Unsuspecting developers downloading poisoned forks could unwittingly introduce vulnerabilities into their applications, potentially compromising entire systems.
The Defense-Dominance Challenge
The “offense vs. defense balance” determines global stability—if offense has the upper hand, the world is more dangerous. Many believe pushing toward defense-dominance, especially in cyberspace, is critical as AI advances. One optimistic vision uses AI for cybersecurity: systems that automatically scan code for bugs, fortify networks, and predict new hacking methods.
If “good guys” get AI to harden every system, it could become vastly harder for any attacker to cause widespread harm. Software updates could roll out instantly when AI identifies vulnerabilities, dramatically shrinking exploit windows. In defense-dominant scenarios, even extremely capable AI wouldn’t easily lead to disaster because abuse avenues are locked down.
This is a tall order—offense currently has cyber warfare advantages. But heavy investment in defensive technologies like advanced encryption, formal code verification, and AI-driven network monitoring might tip scales. Making defense easier than attack is a challenge on par with the original internet invention, but if realized, would make the AI future far more secure.
So there’s my attempt at naming every AI security problem. I’m sure I missed some—that’s the point of putting this out there. The real question isn’t whether this list is complete, but whether we’re taking these problems seriously enough while there’s still time to do something about them.
Mikko S. Niemelä 