The phone rings. It’s the secretary of state calling. Or is it?
For Washington insiders, seeing and hearing is no longer believing, thanks to a spate of recent incidents involving deepfakes impersonating top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration.
Digital fakes are coming for corporate America, too, as criminal gangs and hackers associated with adversaries including North Korea use synthetic video and audio to impersonate CEOs and low-level job candidates to gain access to critical systems or business secrets.
Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, creating realistic deepfakes is easier than ever, causing security problems for governments, businesses and private individuals and making trust the most valuable currency of the digital age.
Responding to the challenge will require laws, better digital literacy and technical solutions that fight AI with more AI.
“As humans, we are remarkably susceptible to deception,” said Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and founder of the tech firm Pindrop Security. But he believes solutions to the challenge of deepfakes may be within reach: “We are going to fight back.”
AI deepfakes become a national security threat
This summer, someone used AI to create a deepfake of Secretary of State Marco Rubio in an attempt to reach out to foreign ministers, a U.S. senator and a governor over text, voice mail and the Signal messaging app.
In May someone impersonated Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
Another phony Rubio had popped up in a deepfake earlier this year, saying he wanted to cut off Ukraine’s access to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service. Ukraine’s government later rebutted the false claim.
The national security implications are huge: People who think they’re chatting with Rubio or Wiles, for instance, might discuss sensitive information about diplomatic negotiations or military strategy.
“You’re either trying to extract sensitive secrets or competitive information or you’re going after access, to an email server or other sensitive network,” Kinny Chan, CEO of the cybersecurity firm QiD, said of the possible motivations.
Synthetic media can also aim to alter behavior. Last year, Democratic voters in New Hampshire received a robocall urging them not to vote in the state’s upcoming primary. The voice on the call sounded suspiciously like then-President Joe Biden but was actually created using AI.
Their ability to deceive makes AI deepfakes a potent weapon for foreign actors. Both Russia and China have used disinformation and propaganda directed at Americans as a way of undermining trust in democratic alliances and institutions.
