Elections in the United States have been a battleground for foreign adversaries dating back at least a decade, with Russia, Iran, and China all using cyberattacks and social media campaigns to disrupt or interfere with the voting process. Add in the advanced cyber capabilities of the latest artificial intelligence models, their ability to generate bespoke information on command, and a highly polarized electorate, and the upcoming U.S. midterm elections begin to look like a potential minefield of misinformation.

But the overarching message from more than half a dozen experts whom Foreign Policy spoke to, including current and former tech executives and government officials, is that it’s not time to press the panic button just yet.

Elections in the United States have been a battleground for foreign adversaries dating back at least a decade, with Russia, Iran, and China all using cyberattacks and social media campaigns to disrupt or interfere with the voting process. Add in the advanced cyber capabilities of the latest artificial intelligence models, their ability to generate bespoke information on command, and a highly polarized electorate, and the upcoming U.S. midterm elections begin to look like a potential minefield of misinformation.

But the overarching message from more than half a dozen experts whom Foreign Policy spoke to, including current and former tech executives and government officials, is that it’s not time to press the panic button just yet.

“There are attempts to use AI to deceive, certainly, but they haven’t been particularly effective,” said Matt Masterson, a senior director for elections and societal resilience at Microsoft. “I haven’t seen anything that’s really taken hold in this election cycle or jumped out at me as really having an impact in that way.”

That’s not to say that U.S. adversaries couldn’t be—or aren’t already—using AI tools to make their disinformation campaigns more effective. Large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini (to name only a few) give bad actors the ability to operate at a speed and scale that they previously couldn’t.

“It’s helped them operationalize their work and almost industrialize it—it means that they can spin up content more quickly. They can also do a lot of research more effectively and quickly in terms of their target audience,” said Olga Belogolova, the director of the emerging technologies initiative at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Investigators have uncovered past Russian and Iranian campaigns because of mistranslations into English or a lack of knowledge of local slang. But AI allows those actors to sound more authentic on........

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