“Attacking” Big Data: Strategic Competition, the Race for AI, and the International Law of Cyber Sabotage

Abstract

This chapter begins with a discussion of the national security threat that China’s AI development efforts pose, and the importance of big data to those efforts. It then moves to a review of potential cyber-enabled operations, particularly as applied to data, that could impede or thwart China’s AI development. The chapter then proceeds to a review of the international law implications of cyber sabotage, beginning with a discussion of the jus ad bellum and followed by a review of other relevant aspects of the international law of state responsibility such as the rule of prohibited intervention, principles of state sovereignty, and the doctrines of countermeasures and necessity.

Various cyber means allow for the sabotage of China’s AI development in ways that do not violate the prohibition on the use of force, and may not, depending on how the cyber means are employed, implicate the doctrine of prohibited intervention. Carefully crafted precision tools might be used to poison China’s progress in AI without crossing any thresholds barred by international law.

Keywords: data, artificial intelligence, AI, cyber sabotage, international law, national security