  Potential malicious misuse of civilian artificial intelligence (AI) poses
serious threats to security on a national and international level. Besides
defining autonomous systems from a technological viewpoint and explaining how
AI development is characterized, we show how already existing and openly
available AI technology could be misused. To underline this, we developed three
exemplary use cases of potentially misused AI that threaten political, digital
and physical security. The use cases can be built from existing AI technologies
and components from academia, the private sector and the developer-community.
This shows how freely available AI can be combined into autonomous weapon
systems. Based on the use cases, we deduce points of control and further
measures to prevent the potential threat through misused AI. Further, we
promote the consideration of malicious misuse of civilian AI systems in the
discussion on autonomous weapon systems (AWS).
