The most pressing danger from AI isn't a hypothetical superintelligence but its use as a tool for societal control. The immediate risk is an Orwellian future where AI censors information, rewrites history for political agendas, and enables mass surveillance—a threat far more tangible than science fiction scenarios.

The most immediate danger of AI is its potential for governmental abuse. Concerns focus on embedding political ideology into models and porting social media's censorship apparatus to AI, enabling unprecedented surveillance and social control.

According to internal CIA studies cited by John Kiriakou, financial incentive is the key vulnerability in 95% of spy recruitment cases. Motivations like ideology, love, family, or revenge account for only the remaining 5%, challenging romanticized notions of espionage.

In a major cyberattack, Chinese state-sponsored hackers bypassed Anthropic's safety measures on its Claude AI by using a clever deception. They prompted the AI as if they were cyber defenders conducting legitimate penetration tests, tricking the model into helping them execute a real espionage campaign.

The AI systems used for mass censorship were not created for social media. They began as military and intelligence projects (DARPA, CIA, NSA) to track terrorists and foreign threats, then were pivoted to target domestic political narratives after the 2016 election.

AI 'agents' that can take actions on your computer—clicking links, copying text—create new security vulnerabilities. These tools, even from major labs, are not fully tested and can be exploited to inject malicious code or perform unauthorized actions, requiring vigilance from IT departments.

Powerful local AI agents require deep, root-level access to a user's computer to be effective. This creates a security nightmare, as granting these permissions essentially creates a backdoor to all personal data and applications, making the user's system highly vulnerable.

According to Kiriakou, a former CIA director coined the term 'conspiracy theory' as a deliberate strategy to marginalize and dismiss individuals who were accurately exposing secret and unethical agency operations like MKUltra, making them sound irrational.

Research shows that text invisible to humans can be embedded on websites to give malicious commands to AI browsers. This "prompt injection" vulnerability could allow bad actors to hijack the browser to perform unauthorized actions like transferring funds, posing a major security and trust issue for the entire category.