The Impact of AI on Strategic Stability is What States Make of It: Comparing US and Russian Discourses

ABSTRACT

Military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are said to impact strategic stability, broadly defined as the absence of incentives for armed conflict between nuclear powers. While previous research explores the potential implications of AI for nuclear deterrence based on technical characteristics, little attention has been dedicated to understanding how policymakers of nuclear powers conceive of AI technologies and their impacts. This paper argues that the relationship between AI and strategic stability is not only given through the technical nature of AI, but also constructed by policymakers’ beliefs about these technologies and other states’ intentions to use them. Adopting a constructivist perspective, we investigate how decision-makers from the United States and Russia talk about military AI by analyzing US and Russian official discourses from 2014–2023 and 2017-2023, respectively. We conclude that both sides have constructed a threat out of their perceived competitors’ AI capabilities, reflecting their broader perspectives of strategic stability, as well as the social context characterized by distrust and feelings of competition. Their discourses fuel a cycle of misperceptions which could be addressed via confidence building measures. However, this competitive cycle is unlikely to improve due to ongoing tensions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligence
• strategic stability
• discourse
• arms control
• United States
• Russia

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Ondřej Rosendorf and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on previous drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ China is also a key developer of military AI technologies (Boulanin et al. 2020; Haner and Garcia 2019). However, it has a relatively smaller nuclear stockpile, estimated at 410 warheads (Kristensen, Korda, and Reynolds 2023).

² These documents were collected from the official websites of the US public authorities such as the White House, the Department of Defense, and numerous national agencies publishing policies relating to AI.

³ These documents were collected from the official websites of the President of Russia, the Russian Government, the Ministry of Defense, as well as via a keyword search on the websites of Russian information agencies: RIA Novosti, TASS, Interfax. Documents in Russian have been translated by the authors. All mistakes in translation are our own.

⁴ Both systems reportedly integrate AI elements and are at an R&D stage (Boulanin et al. 2020, 50).

⁵ Similarly, a survey of Russian experts conducted at the end of 2021 shows that most experts consider space weapons as the “main factors” affecting strategic stability (Savelyev and Alexandria 2022).

⁶ In September 2022, Shoigu said that Russia is not only waging war against Ukraine, but also fighting with NATO and the “collective West” (TASS 2022a).

Additional information

Funding

Anna Nadibaidze’s research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 852123).