By Robert Booth
Publication Date: 2026-01-22 19:00:00
Political leaders could soon deploy swarms of AI agents that mimic humans to shift public opinion in ways that threaten to undermine democracy, a high-profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned.
Nobel Peace Prize-winning free speech activist Maria Ressa and leading AI and social scientists from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are part of a global consortium highlighting the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and messaging channels.
A would-be autocrat could use such swarms to persuade the population to accept canceled elections or overturn results, they said, while predicting the technology could be used widely by the US presidential election in 2028.
The warnings, published today in Science, come alongside calls for coordinated global action to combat the risk, including “swarm scanners” and watermarked content to counter AI-driven misinformation…
