AI-powered cognitive warfare demands a new defence of public trust

Information warfare has moved beyond fake news to shaping how we think. Building cognitive resilience is now as important as safeguarding our borders

Much of the discussion on information warfare focuses on fake news, deepfakes and AI-generated content designed to spread falsehoods. These threats remain real, but increasingly they represent yesterday’s battle. 

Today, information warfare is evolving into more sophisticated cognitive warfare, wherein the objective is no longer just to persuade people to believe a false narrative, but to shape how they perceive reality itself by influencing what they pay attention to, whom they trust, how they evaluate evidence and, ultimately, how they make decisions. The battlefield is no longer information alone. It is the human mind, and the cognitive processes through which people form judgements. 

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made creating convincing fabricated content inexpensive. But the real transformation is strategic rather than technological. Modern influence operations increasingly do not invent falsehoods. They identify existing social fissures such as political disagreements, economic anxieties, or distrust of institutions and amplify them, like a magnifying glass enlarging an existing crack. Amplification makes one part of reality appear to define the whole. The objective is not to create new divisions, but to repeatedly direct public attention towards existing ones and distort the sense of proportion much like an optical illusion. 

Amplification is far more difficult to counter than fabrication because it builds on realities that already exist. A fabricated claim can eventually be disproved. In amplification, the facts remain the same, but repeated magnified exposure of a part changes our perception of what is important, representative or urgent. Once that perceptual lens is shaped, every subsequent event is viewed through it. 

This shift has been reinforced by the redesign of social media itself. A decade ago, platforms largely connected people with friends and accounts they chose to follow. Today, the platforms themselves increasingly decide what users see. TikTok transformed social media through short videos and its “For You” feed, where algorithms recommend content based not on who created it but on its ability to capture attention. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and X have followed the same model. This matters because the human brain responds more quickly and emotionally to faces, voices and moving images than to text. Combined with infinite scrolling, auto-play, and frictionless sharing, these recommendation systems have transformed social networks into attention networks, making amplification faster, wider and more powerful than ever before. 

These innovations were introduced by the social media platforms to maximise user engagement, not to enable information warfare. Yet together they have created an unprecedented infrastructure for cognitive influence. Content now spreads less because of who shares it and more because algorithms predict it will hold attention. Since outrage generates stronger engagement than nuance, emotionally charged narratives travel farther than balanced ones. 

Cognitive warfare goes a step further. While amplification seeks to dominate attention, cognitive warfare seeks to degrade judgement itself. The objective is no longer to persuade people to accept a particular narrative, but to undermine their confidence in judging any narrative. Imagine being exposed every day to an endless stream of videos, expert claims, counterclaims, manipulated images, genuine footage taken out of context, AI-generated content and fabricated fact-checks. Individually, much of it may be unconvincing. Collectively, however, it creates confusion. Over time, people stop asking what is true and begin asking whether anything can be trusted. That shift is the strategic objective. A population that trusts nothing is often more useful to an adversary than one that believes a specific falsehood, because it becomes far harder to mobilise, reassure or unite during a crisis. 

This is what distinguishes cognitive warfare from traditional propaganda. Propaganda sought to replace one belief with another. Cognitive warfare seeks to undermine the ability to judge what is true. Consider a natural disaster. Normally, an evacuation order from the authorities would trigger immediate action. But after prolonged exposure to manipulated videos regarding imminent disaster, people may hesitate. Is the warning genuine? Has the official account been hacked? The delay itself can cost lives. The battlefield is no longer information. It is human judgement. 

AI is accelerating this transition. It can produce thousands of tailored messages, identify which narratives generate the strongest engagement, and continuously refine them for different audiences, languages and emotional triggers. Influence operations thus become adaptive learning systems rather than static campaigns. The next step is agentic AI. Instead of human operators coordinating networks of accounts, autonomous AI agents will conduct millions of personalised conversations, adapt to individual responses, build credibility over time and subtly reinforce selected narratives. Cognitive warfare will become continuous, conversational and highly personalised. 

The implications are huge. Public trust is a strategic national asset, and the ability of citizens to distinguish genuine public concerns from orchestrated amplification influence a nation’s resilience during crises. 

Technology, regulation and international cooperation will all be essential. But none can keep pace with the speed and scale of AI-driven influence operations. Just as previous generations built military resilience to defend territory and cyber resilience to protect digital infrastructure, this era demands cognitive resilience to protect democratic judgement. 

The most durable defence lies in building cognitive resilience: Teaching citizens how amplification works, strengthening trusted channels of communication, and encouraging respectful dialogue across differences. Finland’s model of media literacy could be studied. As information warfare evolves into cognitive warfare, the first line of defence is no longer only the border. It is the informed citizen. Pause before you believe. Pause before you share. 

The writer is Chairman, UPSC and former Defence Secretary of India. The views are personal