Artificial intelligence (AI) is designed not to answer certain questions—for example, those that could facilitate the construction of bombs or other dangerous activities. Technical safety mechanisms are intended to prevent such harmful assistance. However, the same methods can also be misused to suppress legitimate questions about history, politics, or other sensitive topics.

This so-called dual-use risk is the focus of a position paper by LMU researchers Sarah Ball and Dr. Phil Hackemann, which received an award at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026 in Seoul, South Korea, one of the world's leading conferences on machine learning.

“As AI researchers, we must recognize that the methods we develop can also be misused,” says Sarah Ball. “We hope to raise awareness of this risk—not only within the research community, but beyond it as well.”

Ball is a doctoral researcher at LMU's Social Data Science and AI Lab and the Munich Center for Machine Learning. Together with political scientist Phil Hackemann, she works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, AI safety, social data science, and political science.