AI swarms could hijack democracy without anyone noticing

**AI Persona Swarms as Democratic Influence Vectors** A policy forum paper in *Science* (DOI: 10.1126/science.adz1697) describes how coordinated networks of LLM-generated personas can infiltrate online communities, adapt messaging in real time, and run large-scale persuasion experiments — all potentially managed by a single operator controlling thousands of distinct synthetic identities. Unlike earlier bot networks with static, detectable patterns, these systems can dynamically adjust argumentation strategies based on observed community responses, making attribution and detection substantially harder. The practical threat is operational scale: traditional influence campaigns were bottlenecked by human labor, whereas LLM-based swarms remove that constraint entirely, with direct implications for platform trust systems, election integrity monitoring, and the detection pipelines that researchers and policy teams currently rely on.