When AI use turns dangerous for diplomats
Shadow AI is quietly reshaping diplomatic work in ways that threaten confidentiality, weaken strategic thinking, and expose the inner workings of foreign ministries to forces far beyond their control.
Diplomats are increasingly turning to tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek to speed up drafting, translating, and summarising documents, a trend Jovan Kurbalija describes as the rise of ‘Shadow AI.’ These platforms, often used through personal accounts or consumer apps, offer speed and convenience that overstretched diplomatic services struggle to match.
But the same ease of use that makes Shadow AI attractive also creates a direct clash with diplomacy’s long-standing foundations of discretion and controlled ambiguity.
Kurbalija warns that this quiet reliance on commercial AI platforms exposes sensitive information in ways diplomats may not fully grasp. Every prompt, whether drafting talking points, translating notes, or asking for negotiation strategies, reveals assumptions, priorities, and internal positions.
Over time, this builds a detailed picture of a country’s concerns and behaviour, stored on servers outside diplomatic control and potentially accessible through foreign legal systems. The risk is not only data leakage but also the erosion of diplomatic craft, as AI-generated text encourages generic language, inflates documents, and blurs the national nuances essential to negotiation.
The problem, Kurbalija argues, is rooted in a ‘two-speed’ system. Technology evolves rapidly, while institutions adapt slowly.
Diplomatic services can take years to develop secure, in-house tools, while commercial AI is instantly available on any phone or laptop. Yet the paradox is that safe, locally controlled AI, based on open-source models, is technically feasible and financially accessible. What slows progress is not technology, but how ministries manage and value knowledge, their core institutional asset.
Rather than relying on awareness campaigns or bans, which rarely change behaviour, Kurbalija calls for a structural shift, where foreign ministries must build trustworthy, in-house AI ecosystems that keep all prompts, documents, and outputs within controlled government environments. That requires redesigning workflows, integrating AI into records management, and empowering the diplomats who have already experimented informally with these tools.
Only by moving AI from the shadows into a secure, well-governed framework, he argues, can diplomacy preserve its confidentiality, nuance, and institutional memory in the age of AI.
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