Canadian intelligence agency warns of threat AI poses to upcoming elections

Canada’s signals and cyber intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), is warning that hostile actors are likely to use artificial intelligence tools in an attempt to disrupt the country’s forthcoming elections.

The good news from the report is that CSE assesses it to be “very unlikely … that disinformation, or any AI-enabled cyber activity, would fundamentally undermine the integrity of Canada’s democratic processes.”

But the agency warns the widespread theft of “billions of data points on democratic politicians, public figures, and citizens around the world” by China in particular could boost interference efforts going forward.

“By possessing detailed profiles of key targets, social networks, and voter psychographics, threat actors are almost certainly enhancing their capabilities to conduct targeted influence and espionage campaigns,” states the report, released Thursday.

Beijing’s acquisition of bulk data sets on the populations of adversarial countries has caused concern across the West. Earlier this week, the U.S. announced dozens of criminal charges against hackers employed by the Chinese government, and detailed the data brokerage ecosystem in the country where enterprising groups sell this pilfered material to China’s intelligence services.

The CSE referenced a hack of the British electoral system — which the British government attributed last year to state-affiliated Chinese actors — and warned such datasets can be used “to develop propaganda campaigns tailored to specific audiences.”

Beyond attempts at interference, it is “very unlikely that hostile actors will carry out a destructive cyber attack against election infrastructure, such as attempting to paralyze telecommunications systems on election day, outside of imminent or direct armed conflict,” the agency assessed.

But politicians and political parties in the country are likely to be targeted by threat actors seeking to conduct hack-and-leak operations, with these threat actors likely to “leverage LLMs to engage with targets as part of an extended phishing operation.”

The CSE said it has been tracking AI-enabled interference campaigns against global elections, noting that of 151 total national-level elections between 2023 and 2024, 40 were targeted by interference activity.

The agency said it wasn’t able to attribute the majority of these to specific actors, although it did identify “a high number” attributed to Russia and China and expected those states and Iran to continue to drive most of this activity.

Generative AI is also being used by cybercriminals and non-state actors to “create deepfake pornography of politicians and public figures,” almost all of whom are women.

“On at least one occasion, that content was seeded to deliberately sabotage the campaign of a candidate running for office,” the agency stated. “We assess that these AI-enabled personal attacks will almost certainly increase given the wide availability of these models.”

A date has not yet been set for this year’s Canadian federal elections. Although they are currently expected on October 20, they may be held earlier. Justin Trudeau, the incumbent Prime Minister, has announced he is stepping down as the Liberal Party leader. His replacement is expected to be announced on March 9.