Future Scenario
Issue #012
In 2031, a four-second video of a head of state declaring war could reach hundreds of millions of people before any government confirms it is fake, and by then the markets have already moved.
By Santhosh Vishwamitra
What this scenario covers
- The situation we are heading toward
- How deepfake propaganda unfolds in stages
- Best Case / Most Likely / Worst Case
- Wild Card
- Consequences for ordinary citizens
- Who is building detection, who is developing offensive capabilities
- The layer beneath the video
- Baseline and Scenario Timeline
- Key takeaways
The Situation We Are Heading Toward
The following scenario is fictional, but it is built around capabilities and institutional weaknesses that already exist or are developing today.
Imagine this. It is 2:47 AM in a European capital. A video surfaces on three encrypted messaging channels simultaneously. It shows the country's prime minister, in what appears to be a private office, ordering a military strike on a neighboring nation's civilian infrastructure. The voice matches. The lip movements match. The background matches known government interiors. Within forty minutes, the clip has been shared two million times. Stock futures drop. The neighboring country's ambassador demands an explanation. The prime minister is asleep.
By the time her office issues a denial at 6:15 AM, three allied nations have issued statements calling for restraint. Two have quietly raised their defense alert levels. The video is confirmed synthetic at 8:30 AM by a forensic lab. But the damage is structural. Trust in the information environment has cracked further. And the state that produced the fake has learned exactly how long the confusion window lasts.
The technology behind this scenario already exists. What remains uncertain is how quickly it will scale, how governments respond, and whether institutions can verify synthetic media faster than adversaries can distribute it.
How Deepfake State Propaganda Unfolds
Phase one, 2025 to 2027: Deniable disruption.
State-linked actors use synthetic audio and short video clips to muddy specific political moments. A leaked phone call between two diplomats. A fabricated statement from a general during a border standoff. The goal is not to convince everyone the clip is real. The goal is to make it impossible to quickly confirm or deny anything. Plausible deniability cuts both ways. The attacking state can claim it did nothing. The targeted state cannot prove origin without revealing its own intelligence capabilities.
Phase two, 2027 to 2030: Industrialized fabrication.
Generation costs collapse. Capabilities that required specialized expertise and infrastructure in the mid-2020s could become accessible through consumer-grade tools later this decade. State propaganda units shift from creating individual fakes to flooding entire information spaces with hundreds of synthetic clips per day during a crisis. The objective moves from "make people believe this one lie" to "make people believe nothing can be verified." Epistemic exhaustion becomes the weapon.
Phase three, 2030 onward: Integration with AI-assisted decision systems.
Deepfakes could move beyond influencing human audiences and begin targeting systems that help humans interpret information. Fabricated orders, synthetic voice communications or manipulated visual evidence could be used to confuse command structures or influence AI-assisted decision-making. The threat would no longer be purely informational. It could become operational.
These probabilities are editorial scenario estimates, not statistical forecasts or consensus assessments.
Best Case
Editorial probability estimate: 15%
International norms develop quickly. A multilateral treaty, perhaps under UN auspices, classifies state-sponsored deepfake operations against foreign governments as equivalent to cyberattacks under existing international law. Detection tools become fast enough to flag synthetic media within seconds of publication. Major platforms implement cryptographic provenance standards so that authentic video carries a verifiable chain of custody from camera to screen.
In this version, deepfakes remain a nuisance rather than a strategic weapon. They are treated like forged documents: serious, prosecutable, but not capable of toppling governments. Public media literacy improves. Citizens learn to check before they share. The confusion window shrinks from hours to minutes.
Most Likely
Editorial probability estimate: 60%
Detection improves but never fully outpaces generation. A cat-and-mouse dynamic persists. States invest in forensic labs, but those labs are national assets, not shared global infrastructure. Verification takes hours, sometimes days, during which the fake has already done its work.
Western democracies may pass domestic legislation targeting malicious synthetic political media, but enforcement against foreign state actors is extremely difficult. States with weaker legal or political constraints may face fewer domestic barriers to deploying such capabilities. The gap between offensive capability and defensive response widens slightly each year.
Here is where experts genuinely disagree. Researchers at institutions like RAND argue that provenance standards (cryptographic signatures on authentic media) can solve the problem at the infrastructure level. Others, including analysts at NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, contend that provenance only works if every platform and every device enforces it, which is politically unrealistic given that adversarial states will simply not comply. I find the second position more grounded in how international compliance actually functions, but the first is technically sound if universal adoption were achievable. It probably is not.
The most likely outcome is a fragmented information environment where citizens in well-resourced democracies have some protection, while populations in less digitally sovereign nations face constant synthetic manipulation with no recourse. Elections in those regions become increasingly unreliable. Alliances strain. Trust in video evidence erodes across journalism, courts, and diplomacy.
Worst Case
Editorial probability estimate: 25%
A deepfake triggers a kinetic military response before it can be debunked. A fabricated video of a nuclear-armed state's leader authorizing a first strike spreads through political, military and media channels during a period of heightened tension. Decision-makers, already operating under severe time pressure, cannot immediately establish whether the material is genuine. The verification window becomes longer than the decision window.
No one has to be fully convinced the video is real. They only need to be uncertain enough to act on precaution. And in nuclear doctrine, precaution can mean launch.
Alternatively, a sustained deepfake campaign against a fragile democracy succeeds in delegitimizing an election result. Competing factions each claim the other fabricated evidence. Civil unrest escalates. External actors who produced the fakes watch from a safe distance. No bomb was dropped. No soldier crossed a border. The state destabilized itself because it could no longer agree on what was real.
Wild Card
A major deepfake detection platform, trusted by multiple governments and media organizations, is itself compromised. A state actor infiltrates the verification infrastructure and begins selectively marking genuine footage as synthetic while certifying fakes as authentic. The result is not just confusion about individual clips. It is the destruction of the verification layer itself. Once citizens and institutions can no longer trust the tools meant to separate real from fake, the entire epistemic foundation of public discourse collapses. Recovery from that kind of breach could take a decade.
I assign this perhaps a 5 to 8 percent probability over the full period. Low. But the consequences are severe enough that strategic planners cannot ignore it.
Consequences for Ordinary Citizens
For a voter in a mid-size democracy, the most immediate effect is not that they will believe a fake. It is that they will stop believing anything. When every video could be synthetic, the rational response is skepticism toward all video. That skepticism is corrosive. It undermines journalism. It weakens court evidence. It makes it harder to hold power accountable because any inconvenient footage can be dismissed as fabricated.
For a small business owner whose competitor is backed by a state-linked information operation, a single fake audio clip alleging corruption can destroy a reputation before any correction arrives. The correction gets a fraction of the reach.
For a parent trying to explain current events to a teenager, the conversation shifts from "what happened" to "how do we know what happened." That is not a trivial change. It moves the burden of verification onto individuals who have no forensic tools and no institutional backing.
Who Is Building Detection, Who Is Developing Offensive Capabilities
| Actor |
Primary Activity |
Current Assessment |
| United States |
Detection, provenance and information-security research |
Advanced defensive ecosystem |
| European Union |
Regulation, provenance, media literacy and research |
Developing to advanced |
| Russia |
Influence operations and synthetic-media use |
Significant state-linked capability |
| China |
Synthetic media, surveillance and information operations |
Significant state-linked capability |
| NATO |
Research, strategic communications and coordination |
Developing |
| Non-state actors |
Fraud, extortion, harassment and influence operations |
Increasing capability |
The Layer Beneath the Video
Most public discussion of deepfakes focuses on the content. Is the video real or fake. That framing misses the actual strategic problem. Once a synthetic video has been widely distributed, the content itself becomes only part of the problem. What matters strategically is the speed gap between fabrication and verification.
The Real Vulnerability
The danger is not simply that AI can fabricate convincing media. It is that fabrication can happen faster than institutions can verify it. The strategic advantage belongs to whoever controls that gap.
Think about it this way. If a state hacks another state's power grid, there is a legal and diplomatic vocabulary for that. Cyberattack. Attribution. Response options. Proportionality. No widely accepted international legal framework currently provides a specific classification for synthetic-media attacks as acts of aggression. There is no agreed threshold for when synthetic propaganda constitutes an act of war. There is no attribution standard. There is no proportional response doctrine.
I have spent considerable time thinking about why this gap persists, and I believe it is because governments find ambiguity convenient. If you cannot clearly define what constitutes a deepfake attack, you retain deniability for your own operations. Major states that publicly condemn foreign deepfake interference are also developing synthetic-media capabilities of their own. The contradiction is structural, not accidental. That makes any future treaty on synthetic-media warfare much harder to negotiate and enforce.
What worries me most is not the technology itself. The same technological ecosystem that enables fabrication can also support verification. Provenance standards can work when they are implemented consistently and preserved across the media chain. Detection models improve every year. The problem is institutional. We are building verification tools inside national silos while the threat operates across borders at the speed of a share button. The mismatch is not technical. It is political. And political problems do not get patched in a software update.
The next five years could prove decisive in determining whether democracies can coordinate a shared verification infrastructure before the confusion window becomes a permanent feature of public life. If they cannot, the information environment degrades into something where truth is not contested but irrelevant. And in that environment, the state with the best fabrication apparatus wins by default. Not because people believe its lies. Because people stop believing anything at all, and in that vacuum, raw power operates unchecked.
Baseline and Scenario Timeline
| Period |
Scenario Trajectory |
Primary Risk |
Defensive Status |
| 2024 to 2026 |
Existing capabilities: synthetic audio, short video and manipulated media |
Election interference, fraud, reputation attacks |
Detection and provenance systems developing |
| 2026 to 2028 |
Potential for real-time video generation |
Crisis manipulation, diplomatic disruption |
Provenance standards emerging |
| 2028 to 2030 |
Consumer-grade fabrication becomes plausible |
Industrialized flooding, epistemic collapse |
Detection improving but fragmented |
| 2030 to 2032 |
Possible integration with AI decision systems |
Operational military risk, nuclear miscalculation |
Multilateral frameworks if political will exists |
Key takeaways
- Deepfake state propaganda is already operational. The question is scale and speed, not possibility.
- The strategic goal is often not belief but confusion. Making verification impossible is itself the weapon.
- Detection technology improves but remains fragmented along national lines while threats operate globally.
- No widely accepted international legal framework currently provides a specific classification for synthetic-media attacks as acts of aggression.
- The confusion window between publication and verification is the critical vulnerability.
- Provenance standards can work when implemented consistently, but universal adoption is politically unlikely.
- Worst-case scenarios involve nuclear miscalculation or democratic collapse through epistemic breakdown.
- Regulatory ambiguity can be strategically convenient for states developing both defensive and offensive synthetic-media capabilities.
- The next five years could prove decisive in determining whether shared verification infrastructure emerges before trust erodes permanently.
None of this is inevitable. The same technological ecosystem that enables fabrication can also support verification. The question is whether political institutions move fast enough to close the gap before it becomes a permanent feature of how nations interact. Right now, they are not moving fast enough. That is not a prediction. It is an observation. And observations, unlike deepfakes, can be verified.
Sources
- RAND Corporation, research on deepfakes and national security: rand.org
- NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, publications on synthetic media and hybrid threats: stratcomcoe.org
- US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, guidance on foreign malicious information operations: cisa.gov
- Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, annual Digital News Report on misinformation trends: reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
- Partnership on AI, Synthetic Media Framework and responsible development guidelines: partnershiponai.org
Santhosh Vishwamitra
Web Developer and Founder of Vishwamitra Chronicles, launched in February 2026.
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