Navigating the Challenges of AI in Cyberspace
Meetings & Events
Date: 20 July 2026
Language: French
Transcript: https://transcripts.un.org/ar/asset/k1j/k1j541a30u?lang=fr
Transcripts available through this tool are created by using automatic speech recognition and are not official records nor official documents of the United Nations. Official records and official documents are available on the Official Document System of the United Nations.

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Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [0:01]:

Hi everyone, thank you for joining today for what is one of the first side events of the first plenary of the Global Mechanism. I am Pablo Rice from the Paris Peace Forum and today we partnered with colleagues from the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs to convene this roundtable on a matter which actually became quite a buzz topic over the past few months and that you might hear quite a bit actually over the next few days, namely AI in cyber, AI for cyber, AI misuse by cyber adversaries and the cybersecurity of AI systems themselves. which was quite a bit a niche topic when we at the Paris Peace Forum started digging into this matter back in 2024, has become a genuine geopolitical object since 2020. 6. Je ne rappellerai pas les derniers développements sur la question, dont je suis sûr que vous êtes bien conscients, mais je voudrais juste souligner que la notion d'abus de l'IA, l'abus de l'IA dans le cyberespace, a été mise au cœur de nombreuses rationalisations sous-jacentes à certaines mesures prises par les gouvernements ou les entreprises. level, especially to justify some stage of structured access, meaning access restriction to frontier proprietary models. And such modalities tend to become the new normal, even if in this space, we should refrain from making too affirmative forecasts. The thing is, as it is often the case for high-profile, quickly evolving technological challenges, that the level of concern is at least as high as the degree of certainty we are all navigating when it comes to the actual cyber capabilities of advanced AI models, but also the modalities of AI uptake in cyber operations. As a result, any corporate or any government action can hardly be by evidence. The evidence gap we are facing is a challenge that no single country, no single organization can bridge alone. And this is why the need for cross-border, cross-sectoral and of course multi-sectoral cooperation is more critical than ever. This is why the Paris Peace Forum launched as launched earlier this month, a new international initiative called INTACT, the Integrated Network for Trusted AI and Cyberspace, that aims to gather expertise across policy and technical circles, spanning cyber and AI security communities, precisely to find avenues to overcome structural obstacles so that reliable evidence can emerge to inform international governance efforts on the matter. Today's discussion fits right into this endeavor and even if we could have chosen to engage in other forums or other processes than the global mechanisms because there are more and more initiatives in that sphere and that's a challenge in itself, we believe that it's still much needed to address this question at the UN in general and within the global mechanism in particular and for two main reasons. The first reason is that the vast majority of states might have felt that they were a little bit left aside from the latest debates about AI and cyber that tended to be framed either around the transatlantic relationship or around a race between the most advanced powers. But if we agree all on the premise that AI may be one of the most transformative and systemic developments in global cybersecurity and stabilities, then at some point, all states should be at the table. La deuxième raison est que, sur la base des réalisations de l'OEWG, le mécanisme mondial représente une réelle opportunité pour les États d'avancer sur le renforcement des capacités en matière de TIC. Et le défi en jeu aujourd'hui est en fait, tout d'abord, une question de capacité, la capacité de la plupart des États à voir évoluer le paysage des cybermenaces liées à l'IA et la capacité de renforcer la défense en conséquence, y compris, bien sûr, en utilisant l'IA in that respect, because let's not forget that AI holds an incredible potential in improving cybersecurity and cyber defense. And the key question I will invite you to reflect on as part of today's discussion is precisely how can we collectively progress towards a fair global benefit sharing of AI in cybersecurity. And to kick off the discussion, I will first give the floor to Mrs. Clara Chapaz, Ambassador of France for Digital Affairs and Artificial Intelligence, for some introductory remarks. Ambassador, the floor is yours.


France · Ambassadrice de la France pour les affaires numériques et l'intelligence artificielle · Clara Chapaz [5:11]:

Thank you for organizing this event. We're very glad to see how many people we have in the room. and also most importantly not only people from different states and stakeholders but also from the private industry so thank you for all the friends that joined today because we strongly believe that something we should only look at with multiple stakeholders looking at the same problem um I mean started saying that when you worked on that topic a few years ago, it was quite niche. I think there's probably not a single international event now that doesn't talk about AI. So there's been some progress made on that front. And obviously, a lot of that is thanks to a lot of people in this room. And it's very important for France to be able to have this meeting in a moment where AI is basically reshaping everything, access to education, to information, to health, to science, the transformation we're living is probably so unprecedented for the scale and the speed at which it's addressing our world. And obviously as well when it comes to national security and cybersecurity. And so to us, it was very obvious to take the occasion to have so many people gathered here in the UN to have this type of discussion ahead of the Paris Peace Forum, which will obviously continue in that direction in just a few months back. in Paris. We know that this technological revolution is completely reshaping how strategic balances and forces are playing in the world we're knowing. And in a moment where we're seeing so much fragmentation, conflicts happening both physically and in the cyber world, we do believe that cooperation is where we should unite when it comes to addressing those challenges. confronted, as everyone knows in this room, to a growing asymmetry, especially with AI, between all the states, but also between offense and defense. And we think it's key to understand to respond to those challenges together, collectively. And to this end, we think that strengthening everyone's capability can only be the way to more globally cooperate on those issues. What we want to focus on today, and we'll hear from everyone in the room in a minute, is first the assessment that we've seen. I mean, everyone has seen this news, but in a world where AI can basically power our hospital, our education system, national security agenda, defense system, but in this world where it can also be a world where AI systems can be switched off from one hour to the other, unilateral decision sometimes, we basically have to face a reality which is that it has become both an infrastructure of progress, but progress is only sustainable for those who can control this infrastructure, is only stable for those who can control this infrastructure. And so people who are only accessing it are taking huge, immense risk when it comes to stability. Two, the answers that we think we must bring to it is basically how to build a path for ourselves. A third way where France has been really pushing for quite a long time, we hosted for those of you who are here, the AI Action Summit back in February 2025, where the President Emmanuel Macron basically gave international resonance to this movement to say that only through international cooperation, states will be able to build their own sovereignty. And that when we're confronted with such a technology, we basically need to address it internationally. Also, when it comes to mitigating the risks, the response to frontier models challenge cannot be national fallback. President Macron also hosted a G7 summit because France is very proud to lead G7 this year. And in the Evian summit, we gathered leaders from G7 and beyond. We also had the immense privilege to have the company of India, Kenya, Egypt and Brazil. And during this summit, the leaders and the tech CEOs discussed together that rather than playing divide, we need to play together accordingly to address some of those challenges. Nous devons dépendre de la mise en œuvre des cadres pour un comportement responsable et garantir que l'utilisation de ces technologies ne soit pas utilisée par des acteurs malveillants. Et pour ce faire, le président Macron a réaffirmé sa conviction que nous devons construire la coopération. Cela aidera non seulement à préserver la sécurité nationale, mais aussi la stabilité internationale dans le cyberespace. La conclusion de cette discussion et de tout le travail que nous essayons de faire avancer, y compris cette discussion, quand il s'agit de l'ONU ici aujourd'hui, c'est que tout le travail que nous menons dans le cadre du mécanisme mondial. is important because it can help us move forward, deliver concrete actionable solutions, which we need more than ever. And so we think that this discussion, as I say, is not something we can only discuss within states, but it's very important that we gather all the actors in the same room as we did during the AI Action Summit, as we did during the G7 Evian meeting, as we're doing today, only by mixing expertise, point of views, and getting everyone in the same room, it's how we can basically address some of the challenges we're facing. So it's the meaning of the event we're holding today. Thank you again to the Paris Peace Forum for bringing us together and for all the participants who've taken a bit of their precious time to come with us in the UN today. Thank you for all the work you're going to present to us and please count on our support.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [11:17]:

Thank you very much Ambassador, and to frame the discussion, we will have selected initial contributions from, from the panelists. from four persons that I would like to thank for their presence today. Jim Reeves, the CEO of the Cloud Security Alliance, Sitiraj Ponraj, the Director for International Cyber Policy at the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, Giacomo Persipoli, the Head of the Security and Technology Program United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and last but not least, Yassil Jarnit, who is head of machine learning and society at again, FACE. And I would like maybe to start with you, Jim, to maybe brief the audience on the current state of play when it comes to what we call CI Cyber Nexus. The Cloud Security Alliance, which is one of the largest alliance actually of practitioners from cybersecurity providers worldwide, as released following the announcement of Anthropic's MITOS, a brief highlighting some of your concerns. And at the top of that was, of course, the AI-driven vulnerability storm we might expect soon. And we had a couple of discussions afterwards, and you told me a couple of times that actually, Of course, the misuse, potential misuse of AI capabilities by cyber adversaries was a matter of concern, but maybe the most immediate one was, let's say, the potential disruption of AI on the, let's say, the cycle of vulnerability discovering and patching as well. So if you could maybe develop a bit on that.


Cloud Security Alliance · PDG · Jim Reeves [13:31]:

When I started, probably you could fit the entire global industry in a room of this size. So it's just a measure of how important the digital world has become. And this is absolutely the most transformational technology in our industry, and it's moving so fast. And I'm assuming it is for every sector everywhere. So as we have looked at this progression and the idea of scaling laws and the compute and data creating this. The other exponential is the tremendous growth in agentic AI, AI agents operating with autonomy. And so that is creating this sort of scalability and this capability, both for good and for bad, that we have to address. So there's three like that showed this incredible capability to be able to find vulnerabilities in any type of software, open source, closed source, doesn't matter. It can find it, can find it quickly. And this notion where we talk about, hey, a zero-day vulnerability, something that will start immediately being used by attackers that used to be very rare are now going to be very commonplace. So how what we did is we activated a lot of security experts, like literally over a weekend, 200 chief information security officers from like really like important companies. And we worked on a document to to talk through this, which is the main thing I want to characterize. It is that we are going to have what we call this upstream vulnerability storm. So all of the software we depend on open source, closed source. is is going to be examined by malicious attackers for vulnerabilities and then they will attack it and so we we are forced into this dilemma of needing to go very rapidly find with all those vulnerabilities themselves and if you you didn't follow if you don't follow this sort of news like this is just an example of that consequence from mythos in April is Microsoft had its like hugest by an order of magnitude patch Tuesday I think was last week just many, many CVEs, things like that. So what we're thinking about this is we're going to find a lot of these vulnerabilities. And the challenge then is downstream, how we get enterprises to be able to manage this, how we get what we call organizations below the security poverty line. Think about hospitals, schools, governments in addition to like the critical infrastructure within any any industry. So we have to have strategies that go beyond just automatically patching things all the time, which can also cause disruption. Like if you're using software to control a pipeline or a rocket launch or things like that, you have to be very careful about patching vulnerabilities all the time. So we have to have other strategies. We talk about zero trust. got to fight fire with fire and it's it's incumbent upon us that cyber security have this collective defense this communications we're talking about and we have to modernize and we have to do it very rapidly The third big thing that happened, just as a final thing, is actually a colleague on the panel I haven't met, Hugging Face, had an issue which they handled wonderfully. And it's just terrific, and hats off to them. On July 16th, they reported that they were attacked by autonomous agents. that got in there and got a foothold and the way they found it actually and resolved it. And it's amazing how quickly they've written all about this was by using agentic cybersecurity agents to be able to go find all of this information. One of the problems they ran into is because of the guardrails On the frontier models, they weren't able to use it for forensics analysis. They weren't able to use the frontier models, so they had to go use the open source open weight models, which I think the one they use is actually one that was originated by China is where it comes from. And then it was posted up up there. So they did a wonderful job, but that's the next big moment. We we found mythos, we could find all the vulnerabilities and now we can see the malicious attackers. using agentic AI to create automated attacks, escalate that within organizations. And that's huge thing. We're actually going to spin up a closed door meeting this Thursday with Chatham House rules for CISOs to talk about what we all know about this. So it's here, it's very powerful. Our incumbent responsibility is to build societies that are resilient to these types of attacks and developments. And so I think thank you for letting me be here. And I think this is just very important, the discussion we're going to have.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [20:24]:

Thank you very much, Jim. And we will indeed dig a bit deeper into the open source dimension with Yasim Janid. But before that, I would like to turn to Director Ponnaraj, maybe to follow up quickly on a question Jim highlighted, which is basically how can public authorities, public organizations manage the disruptive dimension of AI and cyber, but also, and more broadly, what does it take for an organization, for a national authority, public cybersecurity agency such as the CSA to conversely make the most of AI from threat analysis to its own defense. Maybe if you could share what CSA recent work in this area could be maybe shared or transferred to partner agencies, the floor is yours.


Singapore · Directeur de la politique internationale cyber · Sitiraj Ponraj [21:31]:

From a moment in time in last October when we many of you know that Singapore hosts an annual Singapore International Cyber Week and on the sidelines we have ASEAN Ministerial Conference on Cyber Security and so we had organized a agenda we had settled everything at a staff level and then just before the conference started we saw the ministers from ASEAN standing together and speaking very excitedly with my minister. And that's always a worrying moment when you see our ministers getting excited because we don't want them to be. Please don't repeat this outside this room. But the truth is, and I went in there because I was the organizer, and they were all like, yes, we should speak about AI and cyber. And I thought that it would be useful not just to share the thoughts from Singapore, but also from the region, what the agencies are thinking and what is happening, because many countries around the room in the plenary are thinking about these things. Five observations and five quick lessons. I try not to be too long, but I appreciated Clara's points that she made that actually AI and cybersecurity, it has changed the way that we think about cybersecurity. that is the fundamental, there's a fundamental shift. AI is both a threat multiplier as well as a defense multiplier. There's an opportunity part of it, which many agencies are looking at. So the goal is not to simply defend against AI, but to harness AI, to use AI to defend better and faster. So what are some of the things that we are thinking about, some of our colleagues around the region are thinking about, five points. So first is that that vulnerabilities that you know that to recognize the changing threat landscape the fact is that AI is fundamentally changing Frontier AI which uh was just shared is fundamentally changing cyber operations it's it's not just theoretical not just improving existing attacks it is improve it is changing it accelerating attacks in three ways speed scale accessibilities vulnerabilities that took weeks to exploit may now be weaponized within days or even hours, reducing defenders response windows. So from an agency point of view, this is the first starting point. The second thing is that then what do we do? I mean, if the guys on the other side are using AI, then we will need to use AI ourselves. And the second point to leverage AI as a force multiplier for defenders. And government agencies are thinking of how to use AI throughout cyber operations. threat analysis, intelligence analysis, vulnerability prioritization, malware triage, security operations center investigations, incident response. My colleagues back home are working on all of this, but it's not, it's the beginning. There are lots of things that we need to consider as we allow AI to use all of this because you need to trust AI first of all, isn't it? You don't just let AI loose on AI and then hope that everything turns out well. And so there is a need to see how AI is being used in defense, in cyber operations, and how to make sure that it's trustworthy. I think some of these things were covered. But the third thing we recognize is that we need to strengthen cyber fundamentals. There's a third point out of five points, that AI finds weaknesses faster But it does not create always entirely new ones. It does not create new vulnerabilities, but the point is that it finds weaknesses faster. So we have priorities. We still have priorities like asset visibility, secure by design, some of which has been covered, identity security. So it's not to say that it's a brand new thing, but the things that we can do and continue to do to build our defense Fourth, we have to build resilience for compressed attack timelines. I've just covered that. How do we work with different stakeholders, industry who are looking after critical information infrastructure, industry players, those who are involved in development of AI to do this. And in this point, some of us are thinking very carefully about operational technology. Environments often which cannot be patched quickly, making early detection resilience particularly difficult. And finally, and this is something we don't talk about all the time, agencies need to think about investing in people, governance and partnerships. Technology alone is not sufficient. We will need AI literate cyber professionals. Many countries need such people. Governance for responsible AI use needs to be put there in place. Continuous experimentation evaluation, so you can't close up. It reminds me of somebody who once said, the safest computer is a computer that you don't take out of the box, right? So you need continuous experimentation and innovation, strong partnerships with industry academia. Now, we cannot do this alone as states. Now, this is something that all agencies have come to realize, and how we do it is still a question. But yet, I think where there are forums where we can actually work with industry and academia, that's one thing that's going to happen. Very quickly, five things, five lessons, I wouldn't call them lessons, five things we're trying to do. First, treat AI as an operational change, not as a technology trend. We should constantly review risk assumptions and preparedness, rather than treating AI as another emerging technology. Number two, leadership engagement matters. Now in Singapore, we've written to the boards after MITOS came out. We wrote to the boards and said, it's your responsibility to make sure and don't pass it on to some poor IT guy who's, you know, who, who, and, and put the whole burden on him. So it has to be a leadership responsibility, set clear expectations, encourage accelerated preparedness. We've put out an addendum in June, uh, on agentic AI and the use of agentic AI, how do we secure it? Thirdly, Resilience before crisis occurs. I will not go into it. As I said, they don't make new vulnerabilities, they just make it faster to exploit them. Thirdly, something that Singapore is very strongly believing is partnership rather than regulation alone. We've got to partner, not just regulate. That's going to be important. Working with industry is important. And finally, we need to learn how to harness AI responsibility. Government should lead by example, deploying AI internally, maintaining human oversight, validating AI outputs, sharing lessons learned with industry. So it's to complete, it's a new way of looking at things. Some things, those of us who have been doing cybersecurity for a long time, we've got to change our vision of how we see cybersecurity. That's what AI does. But with the risk come opportunities as well. I'll stop here. Thank you very much.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [28:36]:

Thank you very much, Director. I would like to turn to Yasin now, maybe to follow up on the point Director Ponraj highlighted, which is basically the critical need for partnership with the industry. And of course, we might have heard quite a lot about partnerships between public authorities and proprietary model providers, but Another dimension of that, uh, uh, of that, uh, uh, topic is, of course, the partnership with, uh, open weights or open source model, uh, uh, providers as well, because, um, open source AI has been, uh, praise and highlighted for its potential to precisely improving and mainstreaming AI cyber defense beyond the most skilled and resourced countries. This over the past few days, of course, all eyes were on Kimi K3 from the Chinese startup Moonshot AI, which was announced as showing very impressive skills actually. But of course, there is a concern as well that open source or open weight models could be more easily fine-tuned for conducting malicious cyber activities. So in your opinion, Yassin, how can we navigate this tension to make the most actually of open weight, open source AI for bolstering cyber defense?


Hugging Face · Responsable de l'apprentissage automatique et société · Yassil Jarnit [30:09]:

Yeah, thanks for the invitation and for the question, and thanks, Jim, for stealing my Hi, Thunder, and introducing an experience I was going to talk about. Okay, so I will go in a slightly, I think, different direction, but very much related. I'm an open source and open research person at heart. As such, cybersecurity is close to my heart. It's part of us doing our own work and also the contract of trust that we have with other open source actors. which makes me kind of concerned to see conversations increasingly following counterproductive commercial logics and going away from a lot of the research-backed information that we do have. So it's easy to see why. Cyber offense and commercially valuable software engineering are two sides of the same coin, as has already been raised. So given the importance of the market of the latter, this duality means that commercial providers of general-purpose systems have an interest in pushing a narrative that puts them and this idea of powerful models front and center in cybersecurity conversations, even sometimes at the expense of more distributed and field-tested solutions. So even without getting into the geopolitical or democracy concerns there, I will remind people of, for example, the CrowdStrike failure that we had a couple years ago, that shows what happens when you have a single point of failure or relying on a single actor. So I think it's worth going back to some technical concepts. You can stop me at any point, I will summarize. One thing that's worth knowing is that of all the domains for which current AI technology holds promise, software engineering and cybersecurity are a particularly good match. There's a rich open source culture, which means that commercial and open weight providers had troves of data to start with. Coding tasks can be automatically verified, which means that reinforcement learning shows its full potential. And when you have something that's already good, you have companies that have data flywheels where they can keep fine-tuning their models to behave as users would like. So stepping back from the technical lingo, what's important to take away here is that cyber and software capabilities are the easiest to develop. And while frontier companies do retain an edge in ease of use, the core capabilities are and will remain broadly available for all kinds of resource actors. So that's good news for competition, if you care about that. So if you look, for example, at Cursor, a company that was recently acquired by SpaceX, they were able to build hugely successful software by relying on those open models for much cheaper than we have at frontier companies. It's also good news, in my opinion, for cyber defense and the democratization thereof, because it means that companies can start building their own defense systems with all of those open models. So thankfully, we've heard some of that perspective represented here. That's not what we're hearing most of the time, especially since the shock event of the Mythos release that happened in April. So I won't go over the full context again, but as you might remember, Anthropic released Mythos as a blog post, not as a system, where they emphasized that the powerful new models had allowed them to find host of new vulnerabilities. What garnered less attention is that the thrust of those findings was reproduced by people using models that would fit on your cell phones, so that defy this logic of power, and that a lot of what was really wonderful and well done there was a great harness access to moderate compute capabilities, and also being able, now that we have this automation, to use different logics and different schedules and different automation that's what we built our cybersecurity for. So that's something where there was a well of boost of attention on cybersecurity issues on in the age of AI, but I would say a misleading framing of this idea of powerful models. So we could. chop this up to a difference of interpretations. I have obviously different interests working on open source, but we have seen increasingly strong signs that this framing is in itself damaging. A recent study from colleagues at AI Now showed that the way that Mythos has been presented and the way people rely on it introduces real and consequent new vulnerabilities, where in the spirit of defending by itself, it will run basically arbitrary software. So that's one of the ways in which I think questioning those narratives is going to be something that is essential to having shared cybersecurity defense that works. Okay, so where do we go from there? And I mentioned field tested solutions. So I will share a little bit about what's happening at Hugging Face, but maybe not starting with how do we defend it. I'm going to start with how we use AI. We are strong adopters of AI. We have bots that are helping us gather statistics about what we do, but we are very intentional about first never pushing any code that hasn't been understood and verified by humans. Lots of basic cybersecurity, I think, which is why the first cybersecurity incident we had to disclose came from really new types of attacks. And also kind of this idea that you never really trust as much as people say that your coding assistant is secure and has all of the best practices, that it actually does what it's saying. I think that's one really big point. The second point is, as Jim shared, we just saw and addressed a cyber attack. So we had some processing of data transfer logs. That was all with open models. The processing of data transfer logs showed some abnormalities, which pinged a person. The person who has an understanding of how this was, was able to deploy open models to find all of the attack pathways that would have been unlocked using an agent by this initial attack. So as mentioned, that's something that was not only impossible to do with the guardrails that you have on commercial systems, but with Open Models, we're able to do for faster, cheaper, and without having any of our secrets or tokens leave our infrastructure. So that's one thing that we do want to keep in mind, like we're again in a privileged position, this is probably the highest concentration of model experts outside of model developers, but that's something that we think can be an example for how organizations address cybersecurity. So the one takeaway I will really push here is that with AI and with the asymmetries that have been mentioned, the security through obscurity paradigm or security through strict control paradigm goes from something that has been established as a losing proposition in open source software to really a disastrous one, like makes Defender even more exposed to the estimates that we had before. The best thing we can do for cyber defense is first. So there I will go back on the fact that AI doesn't create new vulnerabilities. It does when used carelessly and it's something that we have been people. have a lot of pressure, right? You have to produce so much code, you're not reading it anymore, this is bringing new vulnerabilities. So use AI in software environments with care, collaborate and share every artifact that we can, be it model or software for cyber defense.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [37:53]:

Thank you very much, Yassine, and I would like now to turn to To Giacomo Persi Paoli, Yassine rightly highlighted that having redundancies is key for preventing failure, and that is also critical to have different type of stakeholders and interests involved in policy and governance discussions. The thing is that discussion on AI and cyber tend to multiply across forums, processes, Et l'ambassadeur Chappaz a souligné à juste titre que vous ne pouvez plus aller dans une conférence sans entendre parler de l'IA et du cyber. Par conséquent, le paysage de la gouvernance semble de plus en plus fragmenté, alors que le sujet s'alourdit techniquement. Et donc, bien sûr, une question pour vous sera peut-être comment les États peuvent-ils rester en position de changer les normes qui régiront ces technologies et comment should the expertise and the evidence they need come from and who's responsible, who's responsible basically to build them?


UNIDIR · Chef du programme sécurité et technologie · Giacomo Persi Paoli [39:03]:

Thank you. Question for the very end. Thank you very much. No, it's a pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me and thank you to the Paris Peace Forum and France for organizing this event. I think it's I'm not even going to try to go into the technical side of it because I think the previous speakers already did so very well and are probably better qualified than I am. But I think in the context that you described, one of the biggest risks that states are facing when it comes to shaping norms, discussing how to implement existing ones, et cetera, is to consider AI and cyber as a monolithic theme. I think it's if you try, you're not going to be able to fix AI and cyber at that level. You need to be a little bit more specific. You need to detach a little bit from this kind of a big narrative out there and try to identify what are some priority areas of concern and then, you know, eat the cake one piece at a time in a way. So really focus and have more targeted discussions and interventions on what are some of the key priority areas that States are considering are worth discussing. And in this regard, I want to also to answer part of your second questions around who should be involved, how can we get access to this expertise. I think everyone agrees that this isn't a discussion for States alone. Now, the question is how do we allow the wealth of knowledge that exists outside of States influence state driven discussions, formats, forum and negotiations. And, you know, not only well, just just over two weeks ago in Geneva, there was the first edition of the global dialogue on AI governance, which is another main initiative of the UN. That, of course, for reasons that we all understand, didn't toucher le mot sécurité ou sécurité internationale, même pas avec un très long pôle, mais inévitablement les discussions là ont touché sur la fiabilité, la sécurité, la sécurité des systèmes d'IA. Ce sont des thèmes et des sujets qui, d'une certaine manière, ne font pas vraiment trop attention à la division politique ou aux silos politiques que l'ONU essaie de organise these discussions in, but really focuses on the substance. And this means that perhaps as the GMAC is starting on the same year as the global dialogue on AI governance, perhaps there is an opportunity to open a channel of, if not coordination, at the very least communication with this other UN process where there is a lot of knowledge and expertise that is generated that could be brought into the GMAC as a way of sharing lessons, sharing trends, etc. Et même si pour une raison, cela devient compliqué à faire au sein des chambres du GMAC, peut-être que j'inviterais vraiment les États à allow this wealth of knowledge to influence you. The knowledge is out there. If you're willing to listen and if you're willing to be influenced by the amount of knowledge that is out there, there is plenty that you can then bring to the room. And this is not to cdiscount in any way, shape or form. You all know-how at UNIDIR we really champion multi-stakeholder participation, but we're also realistic that even if you had the perfect modalities for multi-stakeholder participation, 10 days a year in that room are not going to be solving the problem. So you really need to be able to draw more of this knowledge and expertise and let this knowledge and expertise influence you at the national subregional regional level and then bring that over to you. The second point I wanted to make is kind of a following up on what was was mentioned and also by C2 around. One trend that I find particularly concerning, again, having just come back from Geneva, is that clearly AI is considered as one of the main catalysts for economic and social development, right? So everyone understands this. There is a big push towards AI diffusion and AI adoption. And there is a significant risk that as countries are rushing to adopt this technology because of the promises that it brings, they kind of consider the security of the systems that they are implementing as a kind of a, as an afterthought in a way. It is very difficult to reverse engineer security in systems once they're adopted and deployed at scale. So to me, the vulnerability of AI systems as they become more and more embedded in whichever public sector you want, from healthcare to, I don't know, property records, to the judicial system, to whatever it is, energy, water management, whatever it is, the critical sector or the critical infrastructure, as you are embedding AI, you have to be conscious of the fact that you might be introducing new vulnerabilities to your systems. And this requires thoughtful consideration. And why is this relevant to the GMAC? I think I see at least four different ways. First, the security of AI systems as a potential new threat vector to consider. Second, what should we do with AI infrastructure? We all know data centers, clouds, like these are infrastructure that allow, it is kind of unrealistic to foresee a scenario in which every single country in the world will have and will develop national AI capabilities. So it is most likely that access for many parts of the world would be through cloud, would be through shared infrastructure and shared services. How do we protect AI infrastructure? Related to this is what kind of impact will AI have on the implementation of the norms, whether it is protection of existing critical infrastructure, whether it is the norm that calls for coordinated and responsible vulnerability disclosure. How is AI changing that context, for example? And the last point is around AI and capacity building. And here there is, I think, two elements. One is what was already mentioned by Situ and other speakers around how can we make sure that we can use AI for cyber defense? How can we bring more states into the capability bubble where AI can be used to really increase their defense? That's one side. But on the other hand, how can we make sure that we build in states the capacity to counter and respond to attacks on their AI systems? And in this regard, I heard the technical community, there are some who are saying, you know, the AI incident response kind of playbook It's just the same playbook. It's not really new. And others that say it's completely new. Probably reality is somewhere in the middle, but we need to make sure that there is understanding that responding to attacks on AI systems is going is a capability or a capacity we cannot just take for granted. We really need to invest in making sure that it's included. Thank you.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [46:42]:

Thank you so much.

Et je voudrais vous inviter tous à contribuer à la discussion modérée. Et peut-être pouvons-nous commencer par une question qui s'inscrit dans la contribution de Giacomo. Giacomo a souligné que, en effet, les États devraient être prêts à écouter et à être influencés par les connaissances produites par les parties prenantes non gouvernementales. Le fait est que les preuves que nous avons we have currently are coming predominantly from the private sector, right? And so a follow-up question will be then how to build capabilities, especially from the public interest ecosystem, whether public agencies on cybersecurity, AI safety and security institute, but also civil society organization and the academia to be able actually to conduct investigations and produce knowledge that can be then channeled into international discussion, policy discussions, so as to advance on an international consensus about cybersecurity implications of AI. So if anyone has any advice or any thoughts on the conditions under which we can maybe strengthen the public interest ecosystem to produce reliable and actionable knowledge. Nicolas from Sequoia, sure.


Sequoia · Nicolas [48:18]:

Attack these things, we need to like do a rinse and repeat of what it looks like when these AI systems navigate through our networks and look at the procedures that are used. That's how we're going to, we're hunting something that's unknown essentially every time. So we need to study and know the behaviors of how these things look and say log data, um, flow data, like if something is, communicating way too fast that a human couldn't do it. That's kind of a dead giveaway. You have some system talking to another system and just assume compromise and be paranoid.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [49:02]:

Sure. Could you please introduce yourself first? Thanks.


Access Now [49:13]:

Précisément avec Access Now, nous avons organisé la seule session qui aborde explicitement, dans le cadre du dialogue mondial sur l'IA, le lien entre la cybersécurité et l'IA. C'était une session parallèle, elle n'était pas officielle dans le programme, mais c'était l'une des sessions parallèles officiellement prises. Et je pense que dans ces questions sur le lien et la collaboration entre les mécanismes existants au sein de l'ONU et les mécanismes mondiaux, il y a une grande opportunité. Je pense que ce que les commentaires des speaker was addressing in terms of creating standards for like, um, kind of like, um, being able to collect data in a more effective manner and the project that Pablo was presenting in the introduction are very relevant. And I think that there is a lot of connection that can be done in terms of the work that will continue to happen around the global AI dialogue in the intercessional part until the next one, but also something to connect with the scientific panel. on AI because I think that at least my organization and a couple of more civil society organizations have been advocating for the scientific panel maybe to have a role in creating some level of harmonization in the way in which data can be collected for measuring the different emerging threats. We are very interested in that because, as you know, in general, civil society groups are very good in collecting evidence on the ground, but usually it's very incidental in the sense that we So having, for example, the UN, either through the work of the scientific panel or any other kind of effort that can be coordinated between the global mechanism or other initiatives that are already ongoing at the level of standardization could be very helpful in terms of validating kind of a more uniform methodology for doing this. And this will be essential in terms of building the foundation for any further commitment with the UN and with the scientific community. avec un nouveau mécanisme de responsabilisation parce que si on est capable de rassembler les preuves d'une manière standardisée, plus tard, le travail sera plus facile en termes de, comme, s'assurer euh, d'identifier les différentes responsabilités des différents acteurs. Donc, c'est de notre contribution, et je vais souhaiter que cette connexion entre ces différents mécanismes soit établie d'une manière beaucoup plus claire au sein de l'ONU. Merci.


Singapore · Directeur de la politique internationale cyber · Sitiraj Ponraj [51:42]:

Yeah, so call me C2 please. I think the key thing listening to Giacomo and others from the cybersecurity perspective is focus. Now, what we're building capacity for, it's quite easy to go everywhere, but essentially for cybersecurity, AI is a tool, it is a target, it is a threat. And I think we need to evolve an understanding of the, AI can be used as a tool for the defenders, AI is a target itself, and AI is a threat. Now, the thing is, do we need to reinvent everything? And that's sometimes the discussion, everybody gets excited. But from the ASEAN perspective, when we're implementing the norms of the 2015 GGE, we built it in such a way, what does it mean to implement these norms? What do you need to do to implement these norms? And then we added another part to it, which is what capacities do you need to build to implement this norm in order to act out this way? Perhaps we need to focus and come back, why don't we come back to the 2015 GGE norms, which people are already working, states are already working on, and ask ourselves the question, what does this norm mean for AI as a tool, a target, or a threat? Just a thought, thank you very much. To this room, trying to understand.


Speaker 16 [53:06]:

How we impose norms on private sector, on the private sector, when these companies tend to be.


Access Now [53:16]:

So powerful that it's very, very hard There is a need for articulation within the UN, there is a need of articulation between processes or policy discussions that are, of course, targeting states conduct with those targeting regulatory activities of private actors as well. And of course, the global mechanism represented opportunity in that respect also, everything remain to be deployed and established when it comes to the practical modalities of such global mechanism.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [54:10]:

So I would like to come back on that right after, but maybe turn first to Yassin.


Hugging Face · Responsable de l'apprentissage automatique et société · Yassil Jarnit [54:19]:

One of the most hopeful things I find about open models is that if you have one AI system that is open, transparent, documented, and that does something similar to what the frontier does, even if it's behind by six months, that unlocks the entire academic world's collaboration on figuring out what the science is behind what we need to do. we've been able to do that for environmental costs, we're able to do that right now when we're pushing back against some of those narratives around it's a powerful model versus it's a very well put together model. And that's also something that in terms of power, a lot of the power comes from these epistemic positions of we're the only ones who can tell you what you can do with them anyways. Having those open shared alternatives that are maximally transparent, have these open science titles, makes a huge difference. It's not a full answer. One small thing I wanted to add also is about in terms of standards, doing no worse than we did with the Internet protocols is kind of a pretty good target. You are talking about like not everybody is going to have data centers, but not all AI needs heavy computing there, right? Like those are things that we can actually track to the resources that we have for Internet infrastructures.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [55:42]:

Thank you. And not to overdo France's achievement in this respect, but one source was at the very top of the priority of the digital track of the of the G7 with a couple of deliverables on that topic. But coming back again on the articulation of different processes, including of course the G7 with the UN discussion, the discussion on state conduct with those on regulation of private sector, for instance. I know that Giacomo, I feel that Giacomo, you would like to maybe follow up on that, yeah.


UNIDIR · Chef du programme sécurité et technologie · Giacomo Persi Paoli [56:13]:

Yeah, I just wanted to try to at least partially answer the question. the peripheral to the cyber specific issue. But for example, at UNIDIR, we launched earlier this year an initiative that is the response, the framework for the development of responsible industry behavior in the context of AI and the military domain. So it's a mouthful, but the idea is, can we try to co-develop with states and industry together framework of what that articulates what responsible behavior for industry looks like because we have norms for states but can we find an equivalent set of norms for industry and the goal there is not really to develop new commitments but it's try to help industry and states manage each other's expectation in terms of what it is reasonable to expect from industry in terms of responsible behavior in the development, integration and deployment of AI, and on the other, in the military domain in that case, but it can be transferred to the cyber domain as well. And on the other hand, you know, what should states be, you know, we want states to be intelligent customers and be able to guide their decisions on whether or not to work with certain industry players based on So we're trying to create this kind of interface between the two that could potentially be useful also in the context of cyber.


FIRST · Représentant [57:58]:

Thank you for organizing the round table. It's really quite challenging time for all of us, as was mentioned by a couple of the speakers about AI. It's not just about technology, it's about, you know, really how we deal with this technology. It offers opportunities and challenges, and that was mentioned. Among the challenges is a challenge from again the question about regulating AI that that is really an open-ended question uh it is about more about better understanding better cooperation and bridging and that's where the comment from Giacomo about the UNIDIR effort to bring this bridge and it has to be consistent I think we're in a place I was you know 14 years back I was part of the UNGGE and I was part of the GGE that also accepted you know the the norms and developing the norms and the interpretation is quite interesting exercise. But the challenge is how to make States understand what the rules and responsibilities and to deal with this in a way that is also inclusive. I come, I present now as stakeholder, a leading organization in cybersecurity and quite a few of those organizations were blocked from participation. So the challenge is, do we see that we can try to have a consistent, continuous, inclusive and open mechanism for cooperation between states, between industry, because the challenges will keep on going. We will face more challenges moving forward. I think Jim earlier mentioned a few challenges in cybersecurity. I did my PhD in AI 30 years back, and I've seen how AI evolved. So I've been in the cybersecurity industry for over 30 years as well. So I've seen how those crossings happen. And at first, we bring in all the professionals to talk about those issues. However, states are not there. So having this bridge, I hope that we can recommend moving forward with you, I mean, with the leadership of organizing this roundtable or other events for creating those bridges and a more and, you know, a way that is inclusive and open and effective at the same time.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [1:00:19]:

Thank you very much. I completely agree that FIRST should be fully involved in such discussions because a part of the problem is also linked to incident reporting. So, yes, I'm afraid I will have to wrap up the discussion, but we will have a couple of remarks from Charbel Sergery. in a pre-recorded statement from the French AI Safety, with which the Forum has partnered to precisely build a work stream on assessing the bottlenecks the public interest ecosystem face in producing knowledge specifically. no noise I'm sorry So I guess we have a couple of technical problems. So maybe in waiting for this issue to be fixed, I would just leave the floor to Joyce Akme, who will host actually another side event on AI and cyber on Wednesday. And so yes, if you could tease a bit the event, which is almost full, if I'm correct.


Organisatrice d'un événement parallèle · Joyce Akme [1:02:11]:

So, this will be a technical briefing on Frontier AI and the cyber threat landscape. It will happen this Wednesday, as Pablo mentioned, between 1:15 and 2:30 at conference room C here, just two minutes away from this room. So, it builds very much on the discussion that we've been having today. It will be a technical briefing, as I mentioned, delivered by CrowdStrike, who have been at the heart of many discussions relevant to this, and will tackle really kind of how AI, how the technology is changing the threat landscape, what are the opportunities for defense, but also what should states know at this highly important moment that we are living in sort of technological development. And we wanted to organize this event because what all of you have mentioned, the ways in which AI is fundamentally challenging cybersecurity as we know it and demystify some of the misconceptions as well. So we will hear from CrowdStrike. We also have remarks from the ambassadors hosting, but also the chair, Ambassador Lopez, who will be joining us as well. As Pablo mentioned, we expect this to be a very busy event, so it will be first come, first serve, and I hope to see many of you there. Thank you very much, Pablo.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [1:03:44]:

Thank you, Joyce.

With the Cesia, I would like to turn for some final remarks to the Ambassador Chapas that will close the event because I am afraid I need to free you in a couple of minutes.


France · Ambassadrice de la France pour les affaires numériques et l'intelligence artificielle · Clara Chapaz [1:04:11]:

Thank you, Pablo, and apologies for the delay. was a technical glitch. I'll be brief if we don't have that much time, but I just wanted to wrap up hearing the discussion. I think there are a few things we all agree on, then we have a lot of work to do, but the three things I have in mind is one, the scale and the speed at which the technology is transforming our society requires for multi-stakeholders collaboration. both to enhance the opportunities, I think it was important to hear that point, but also to tackle the risks. Two, this is not something we can just figure out on our own, and so we need the industry to set up standards and norms. And we've done that before, so I think we have reason to be hopeful. We've done that with the PALMO process, which actually today is also looking at the impact of AI, but more the process, how we brought the industry together as a group to agree on how to address some of those challenges is a process we've seen work. And so we, France, really want to continue pushing in that direction and looking at this as a potential example on how we could address those challenges. And three, we were very aligned with all the comments that have been made on the role of the UN and the intersection of this conversation in so many different instances. Some of us were at the Geneva AI dialogue last week. And for sure, there are some relationship and gathering that needs to happen between the work we're doing here and the work that's done at the UN dialogue because there is no way we can keep both themes separate in the world. So we are very much in support of looking at how we can get all the work contribute to each other. And we thank you for bringing that point because we think it's fundamental that all instances pushes in the same direction. Thank you.


Paris Peace Forum · Modérateur · Pablo Rice [1:06:07]:

Thank you, Ambassador, and thank you all for your participation today. And I just need to wish you a good week of negotiation. Thank you very much. Je