Paradoxical impact of artificial intelligence on international relations in defence, cyber security and media dimensions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a key catalyst for transformation within the international system. AI offers both significant potential and serious risks, compelling nations to balance extraordinary opportunities with major challenges. The primary goal of this paper is to analyse and present how AI technologies and their paradoxical socio-technical nature are transforming international relations by accelerating global instability and security threats, and creating new vectors of power, vulnerability, and influence. The paper examines transformative impacts in three critical dimensions: defence, cyber-security, and media. In the defence dimension, we show that emerging autonomous systems across all domains will significantly enhance national warfare capabilities, but will also reinforce strategic competition among states, with episodic live tests in conflicts, and increase the strategic dependency of less capable states. AI will also create more powerful offensive and defensive cyber tools, generating a new cyber-security dilemma, increasing the likelihood of new conflicts, and empowering non-state criminal actors. Additionally, in the media dimension, AI will automate and amplify the production, distribution, and consumption of information and disinformation during peace, crisis, and wartime, influencing public opinion and discourse, and exposing democratic states to informational, political, and diplomatic conflicts with potentially serious effects on inter-state trust and stability.