AI as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Artificial Intelligence and the Dismantling of the Human Mind

Demonstrators march during an AI protest in San Francisco, July 2026. Photo credit: Jason Henry

The Loud Face and the Silent Face

What we are witnessing today is not a takeover of humanity by robots of the kind cinema has imagined in countless films. It is a different model of digital control, built on automation and on the deployment of artificial intelligence and algorithms to manage ever larger parts of daily life, leaving societies increasingly subject to systems, corporations and intelligent machines.

Losing control of these systems, however, is only the loud face of this danger, which is developing fast under the pressure of competition between the major powers and the capitalist monopoly corporations, faster than laws, societies and educational institutions can follow. And here lies the heart of the matter: the danger does not stop at the possibility that these systems slip out of control, since they are developed inside relations of ownership and fierce capitalist competition that make such a slip more likely and multiply the cost it imposes on people.

Its graver face is far quieter. Under the capitalist structure that develops artificial intelligence and directs its uses, it helps to shape the consciousness of billions, steering their attention and their behaviour in ways that serve the logic of the capitalist model. Meanwhile, the competition between digital capitalist monopolies and the major powers, in the absence of effective constraints and laws, may inflict the gravest damage on the human mind and could turn artificial intelligence into a weapon of mass destruction if its development and deployment continue at this excessive pace and without safeguards.

These concerns no longer come from critics alone. TIME magazine revealed that an artificial intelligence system had slipped out of control and attacked other systems, and days later some 1,400 engineers, women and men, at the largest companies signed a joint petition calling for the pace of development to be brought under control, and among its signatories were senior figures inside those same companies. Tens of thousands of people, among them leading scientists in the field, have signed an international statement demanding a ban on the development of “superintelligence” until there is scientific consensus that it can be achieved safely. Many thinkers and technologists, among them people working in the field, have also called for its development to be regulated by law and placed under social oversight.

On 12 September 2026 the matter moved to another level. Under worldwide pressure from the public, from rights organisations and from within the profession itself, the digital capitalist corporations that develop AI systems were forced to break their silence. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier”, calling on his own industry to slow the race of development and proposing three steps: opening the laboratories to independent evaluators working inside them with full access, a common standards body among the companies, and an international agreement that includes China.

Within hours Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, announced his agreement and adopted the same step. Elon Musk wrote, “Dario is right,” and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind joined them, while the three companies revealed that they had been in talks on this question for weeks.

This admission, coming from the owners themselves, is the clearest confirmation of how serious the situation is. They say openly that they cannot stop on their own, because whoever slows down loses to competitors, which means that the core of the problem lies in the structure of ownership and competition itself and not in any lack of knowledge about the risks. The political response came quickly. Donald Trump described these warnings as a “hoax” and a “sick conspiracy” and wrote, “Don’t kill the Golden Goose,” while his vice president JD Vance called them a “Trojan horse”. The most powerful state in the world thus stands on the side of acceleration without safeguards, even against the people who build this technology with their own hands.

And I do not believe the corporations developing artificial intelligence will take real measures of control. Their measures will most likely remain formal, aimed at absorbing the growing anxiety and opposition around the world, since they are tied in one way or another to the governing authorities and are subject to the rules of competition and domination.

No one denies the enormous possibilities artificial intelligence offers. It compresses years of research in drug discovery, uncovers protein structures that defeated scientists for decades, raises the accuracy of medical diagnosis and allows diseases to be caught at early stages that save lives, models climate change and gives warning of its disasters before they strike, breaks language barriers through translation and places knowledge within reach of those long denied it, eases daily and professional life, and opens doors to many services that may resolve intractable problems facing humanity.

Those very gains are what make the question more pressing, since this article does not dispute these capabilities. Its subject is who owns them, who directs them, whose interests they serve, and how they are put to work.

Steering Consciousness to Entrench Capitalist Culture

This technology is systematically deployed to shape and steer individual consciousness, with the aim of reinforcing capitalist culture and its values. Through the analysis of data and of behaviour, ranking and recommendation algorithms control the content displayed, and they are designed to feed individuals whatever serves the capitalist outlook.

This tendency has become entrenched as these platforms expand. According to the International Telecommunication Union report, around three quarters of the world’s population are now internet users, an increase of more than 240 million users in a single year. The expansion is due in part to the drive of monopoly corporations and major powers to bring the internet to every corner of the world and to the countries of the South in particular, even in regions that lack clean water, electricity and basic services, because investment priority goes to whatever widens the market ahead of whatever meets people’s needs, with the aim of maximising profit, reinforcing domination and colonising those regions digitally.

In this way collective consciousness is steered gradually toward accepting these values as natural and inevitable, by soft and imperceptible means, to the point where most users, among them sections of the left, regard this technology as a set of neutral tools. Capitalist hegemony is thereby consolidated, and left and progressive ideas and alternatives are pushed to the margins.

Dismantling Human Skills and Voluntary Digital Servitude

The threat reaches into the individual’s mental faculties as well. According to a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reliance on AI writing tools reduces brain activity and weakens memory and the sense of ownership over one’s own ideas, a phenomenon the researchers named “cognitive debt”. Another study found that frequent use is associated with weakened critical thinking through the mechanism of “cognitive offloading”, meaning the delegation of remembering and analysis to devices.

The matter is not confined to laboratories. The results of the international student assessment, published days ago, carried the picture to the level of entire education systems: the worst results in the history of European schools, a decline equivalent to whole school years, and the same picture recurs across dozens of countries. This decline is no incidental side effect, since behind it stands the platform profit model built on digital addiction, in which big data is exploited to understand people’s motivations and to manipulate them.

What makes this domination more dangerous is its voluntary character, in that individuals are pushed, through algorithmic manipulation and through the pressure to use artificial intelligence at work and in daily life, into this “digital servitude” without coercion, under the illusion of control and choice. And it is promoted as individual freedom. Yet freedom whose conditions are not owned by the person exercising it is no freedom at all. It is the freedom to choose among what capital has placed before them, with no authority whatever over what is placed before them in the first place.

What happens at the level of the individual repeats itself at the level of humanity. As a person surrenders their small decisions to algorithms day after day, societies surrender their large decisions to digital systems beyond their oversight. The cause is the same. The absence of collective ownership and of democratic oversight is what makes the individual lose control over their own consciousness, and that same absence is what may make humanity lose control over the most dangerous instrument it has ever built.

On this basis, human alienation is reproduced in digital form. The individual is severed from their mental and creative faculties and finds themselves hemmed in by a technical apparatus that strips away their capacity for independent action and thought. They may gradually become a being subject to the algorithms that direct their daily interactions and determine what they read and watch, how they think, how they write and how they communicate, which may deepen their dependency on systems, corporations and states controlled by capital and by the forces of exploitation and despotism.

Artificial Intelligence May Become a Weapon of Mass Destruction

At the military level, this competition takes shape as an actual arms race that encompasses autonomous weapons, combat robots and targeting systems. Researchers warn that these systems may break down when they move from the testing environment into the conditions of war. The danger is not hypothetical, since AI systems have slipped out of control in cases that were announced and documented.

The destruction artificial intelligence may bring, however, does not stop at the limits of war and military operations, since it has another level, quieter in sound and longer in reach. Nuclear weapons were tied to direct military use, relatively visible and governed by declared international calculations and agreements, and their danger stayed confined to the moment of detonation and what followed it.

At the level of consciousness, by contrast, artificial intelligence works in silence and seeps into the details of daily life, into education, work, the media, services and most sectors of society. It weakens human skills, deepens dependence on digital systems, and critical thinking and cognitive independence recede along with it. Here the destruction becomes quieter and more widespread, and digital servitude itself becomes a form of weapon of mass destruction, since it does not kill a person at a stroke and instead reshapes their consciousness, their capacities and their relationships day after day. The two levels are two faces of one weapon: one destroys bodies in an instant, the other dismantles minds at leisure.

Taking the two levels together, the danger lies not only in producing deadlier weapons, and it lies equally in the reshaping of the human being and of society once the development and deployment of artificial intelligence are subject to the logic of profit, competition, monopoly and control. Artificial intelligence may threaten the human capacity to understand, to choose, to analyse and to decide. It is for this reason that hundreds of leading AI researchers, among them people who helped build the field, signed a brief statement holding that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

When the most dangerous technology in human history becomes a card in the hand of geopolitical and military capitalist rivalry among the great poles, with no genuine legal, social and democratic brakes, the risk of losing control ceases to be a threat to individual consciousness alone and becomes a threat to the future of society and of humanity as a whole.

A Terrain of Class and Cognitive Struggle

Even so, it would be a mistake to fall into technological determinism. Artificial intelligence is an open terrain of class and cognitive struggle. Capital deploys it in repression, targeting, killing and the laundering of consciousness, while doctors, climate researchers, activists, trade unions and labour movements use it in treatment, in struggle and in carrying the voices of victims. And the very evidence that records harm records benefit once the conditions change, in education and in workplaces, where attainment and productivity rise when the system is designed to make the user do the work rather than to do it in their place, and when social supervision is maintained.

The most important question remains: who benefits from these gains? Rising productivity means an increase in the surplus value extracted from the labour of workers by hand and brain, women and men. Artificial intelligence does not arrive here as a neutral technology, since it intensifies exploitation and deepens it, because it allows the same value to be produced with less labour and less time, while the larger share of the gains turns into profit for capital.

This process shows most clearly in the field of work, where the threat artificial intelligence poses to jobs is no longer a future possibility. Many occupations and professional tasks have already begun to face abolition, reduction or restructuring, and broad sections of workers by hand and brain face the risk of losing their jobs or of seeing their working conditions deteriorate as the use of automation and artificial intelligence accelerates.

This shift is often presented as though artificial intelligence were an independent entity that “takes over” jobs, and that framing conceals the economic and political decision behind it. The machine does not decide on its own to abolish a post or to keep it, and it is companies and employers who take the decisions on investment, on dispensing with workers and on distributing the gains of productivity. Every job abolished through the use of a new technology is, in the end, the result of a human decision about how the fruits of technical progress are shared and about who bears their cost.

And even where artificial intelligence replaces no one directly, the mere prospect of dispensing with staff is enough to discipline everyone, and workers accept longer hours, lower wages, closer surveillance and mounting pressure on productivity, for fear of losing their jobs.

In this way the reserve army of labour takes a new digital form, since the mere presence of millions of jobs on the horizon as threatened or replaceable weakens the capacity of the working class to bargain, to organise and to strike. Unemployment here is no technological fate imposed on society, and it is bound up with how the technology is used and with the decisions capital takes.

The very technology that can abolish jobs and raise unemployment is capable, under different social relations, of shortening the working day, holding wages steady, widening rest time and life outside work, and freeing people from a large part of exhausting and repetitive labour. The problem is not artificial intelligence’s capacity to produce more with less labour. It is that the fruits of that capacity are directed, under the capitalist system, mainly toward the accumulation of profit and the reinforcement of capital’s power, rather than being turned into free time, economic security and a better life for those who produce the value.

Conclusion and Tasks: Toward Artificial Intelligence in the Service of Humanity

Here the fundamental contradiction comes into view. Artificial intelligence is a social product in the fullest sense, built on accumulated human knowledge and on the labour of millions, yet its fruits are appropriated as private property by a handful of monopolies and states. This is the contradiction between the social character of production and the private appropriation of its results, reproduced in the most advanced productive force in history. The fundamental problem lies in the ownership of the digital means of production and in control over them, and this is what moves the battle from the terrain of complaining about technology to the terrain of class struggle.

What confronts us today is no technological fate written in advance. It is the product of political and economic choices that serve the interests of capital, and it can be confronted. Doing so requires left, progressive and rights-based organisations on a global scale, placing data infrastructure under the public interest and social administration, turning algorithms from “black boxes” into open-source software open to independent audit, imposing transparency in the design of models and in the sources of their data, supporting cooperative digital alternatives owned by their users and by the people who work in them, and directing this technology toward serving the needs of society and social justice.

Without such mechanisms, calls for laws and oversight remain general and inadequate, and technology stays hostage to a handful of monopoly corporations and major powers. Through social ownership, accountability and cooperative alternatives, by contrast, it becomes possible to wrest artificial intelligence from the logic of monopoly and profit and to turn it into a common good and a means of human liberation.