AI Summaries Are Susceptible to Manipulation — and That's Both a Business and a National Security Problem

More and more people are using AI like a search engine – 42 percent of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots to search for information – and that shift is exposing a structural vulnerability that adversaries are exploiting to seed propaganda. In practical terms, this is a problem of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) – the deliberate effort to shape digital content so that AI chatbots absorb and repeat it.The research so far points to data voids — the thinly covered topics where there isn't much credible information to begin with — as the weak spot. This includes breaking news or new material that has not yet had time to accumulate the signals that would flag it as low authority.AI can process far more information than any human can, but there is an inherent trade-off in outsourcing the curation of information to an AI summary. In the search era, users were exposed to source material and evaluated credibility for themselves. Now AI does that work, and research shows the large majority of AI queries end without a click.This is both a business concern and a national security concern. The clearest example on the consumer side is Apollo-9. In a Chinese state TV investigation, researchers u...