RAND Wargames Possibility of AI Destroying Humanity with Pathogens, Geoengineering & Nukes

by Tim Hinchcliffe | The Sociable

The RAND Corporation wargames scenarios to see if AI could contribute to human extinction by facilitating nuclear war, creating and deploying pathogens, and malicious geoengineering.

According to three simulations conducted in the new RAND report called “On the Extinction Risk from Artificial Intelligence,” AI is currently unlikely to wipe out humanity on its own; however, it could still cause considerable devastation if it were programmed to do so, if it were given enough access to critical systems, and if it were granted decisionmaking powers.

“The capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated to the point at which some experts are advocating that it be taken seriously as a credible threat to human existence”

RAND, On the Extinction Risk from Artificial Intelligence, May 2025

In arriving at their conclusions, the RAND authors war-gamed three scenarios in which AI could pose an extinction-level threat to humanity and what capabilities it would require to get there — a lot of which would involve direct human intervention, naivete, and/or stupidity.

1. Nuclear War: We explored various ways that AI might lead to the use of nuclear weapons, and we could find no plausible way for AI to overcome existing constraints to cause extinction.
2. Biothreats and Pathogens: An extinction threat would require that AI be capable of acquiring, designing, processing, weaponizing, and deploying pathogens to initiate a pandemic. AI would then need to take follow-up actions to reach isolated groups and exterminate surviving human communities.
3. Malicious geoengineering: Geoengineering could threaten extinction through the mass manufacturing of gases with extreme global warming potential, thereby heating the earth to uninhabitable temperatures.

The create a true extinction threat to humanity in any of the three scenarios, the AI would require:

1. The objective to cause human extinction.
2. The ability to integrate with key cyber-physical systems.
3. The ability to survive and operate without human maintainers.
4. The ability to persuade or deceive humans to take actions and avoid detection.

Let’s briefly go through the three scenarios one-by-one. Read Full Article >