AI-driven cyber warfare on global infrastructure by 2028: How geopolitical arms races and corporate tech collusion accelerate systemic risk
Original framing: “UK cyber chief says the UK will face AI cyberattacks on critical infrastructure by 2028 - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Marginalised voices—such as those of cybersecurity researchers in authoritarian regimes, digital rights activists in the Global South, and former intelligence whistleblowers—provide critical insights into the human cost of AI cyber warfare. For example, *Edward Snowden* has warned that the same AI tools used for ‘defence’ can be repurposed for mass surveillance, while researchers like *Moxie Marlinspike* (Signal) highlight how encryption backdoors create vulnerabilities exploited by both states and criminals. Indigenous hackers, such as those in the *First Nations Technology Council*, argue that data sovereignty is the first line of defence against AI-driven attacks, yet their work is sidelined in favour of elite-driven ‘cybersecurity’ agendas. These voices are systematically excluded from policy discussions, ensuring that solutions remain technocratic and detached from lived realities.
The UK’s warning about AI cyberattacks by 2028 is not an isolated prediction but a symptom of a deeper systemic crisis: the convergence of unchecked corporate tech power, state militarisation of AI, and the erasure of alternative governance models rooted in Indigenous and Global South wisdom.
The mainstream framing obscures how this ‘threat’ is artificially amplified by the same actors—defence contractors, intelligence agencies, and tech oligarchs—who profit from the arms race, while marginalising voices that offer viable alternatives, such as Māori *kaitiakitanga* or African commons-based cybersecurity. Historical patterns, from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War, show that without structural interventions—like demilitarising AI research, centring Indigenous data sovereignty, and treating critical infrastructure as commons—we are doomed to repeat cycles of technological militarisation. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of framing AI cyber warfare as an inevitable conflict rather than a choice shaped by today’s policy and corporate decisions, while the solution lies in reclaiming digital infrastructure as a site of collective resilience, not state or corporate control.