By: Jean-Philippe Beaudet

March 10, 2025  

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly cemented itself into the national security discussion and will remain a key focus area where the U.S. must maintain dominance in ingenuity and development. While U.S. adversaries execute AI-enhanced cyber-attacks and deploy fully autonomous weapons systems, more subtle threats from AI likewise hold drastic implications for American national security. Blockchain-based decentralized AI solutions are the most promising options for our developing national AI ecosystem.  

AI is increasingly integrated into software across all industries, from home thermostats and map apps on every phone to the industrial control systems that monitor tank pressure in nuclear reactors and prevent meltdowns. Alongside this growing reach, the machine learning models that ‘teach’ AI are opaque, vulnerable, and their operation requires enormous amounts of energy and computation. The decentralized, open, and immutable nature of blockchain technology offers solutions to these key challenges.   

Shining Light Into AI’s Black Box   

Decentralized AI (DeAI) – (i.e. models rooted in and built on blockchain networks) provides an alternative to the opaque nature of traditional AI, whose learning processes, disturbingly, the world’s best computing experts cannot fully explain. By basing AI models on blockchains throughout AI model construction, every decision, training step, and data point involved in AI processes can be recorded transparently. This allows stakeholders to audit and verify how AI models learn and make decisions, ensuring we understand the possibilities and vulnerabilities of this technology as both we and our adversaries deploy it in the national security context. After all, if AI is guiding our missiles or identifying the targets, we should endeavor to understand how and why it is reaching its conclusions.  

Data Integrity and Poisoning Defense   

Blockchain’s immutable and transparent ledger ensures that data used in AI models remains tamper-proof and trustworthy. Since each data point is securely recorded and distributed across the network, any attempt to alter or corrupt the data is easily detectable. This feature defends against “model poisoning” attacks, where adversaries insert malicious or biased data to manipulate an AI’s learning process. Blockchain safeguards the integrity of the data-feeding AI models, preventing unauthorized changes and ensuring the reliability and accuracy of AI outputs critical to national security.   

Decentralized Computing and Energy Demands   

AI requires extreme amounts of computing power and energy to function effectively. Relying on centralized data centers to handle the computing and power demand can create cooling, physical security, local grid capacity, cybersecurity, and service delay issues for distributors. DeAI allows networks to pool, distribute, and redirect resources as necessary to meet these increased demands. This is exactly why major cloud computing providers have dispersed their data centers worldwide – but this dispersed, centralized AI infrastructure introduces single points of failure that threaten our national security and economic dynamism. For example, if a major cyber-attack disabled Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading global cloud service provider, 34% of the globe’s cloud computing would fail, costing U.S. businesses an estimated $11.4 billion per day.1 This type of centralized digital infrastructure is far less resilient than the decentralized alternatives blockchain technologies enable.  

By leveraging blockchain’s immutable and distributed nature the U.S. can mitigate AI’s black-box risks, defend against adversarial manipulation, and create a more robust computational backbone for our nation’s AI-driven security applications. A decentralized approach ensures that America’s AI ecosystem remains resilient, verifiable, and resistant to the single points of failure that threaten centralized architectures. In an era where technological superiority dictates geopolitical power, embracing blockchain-based AI is not just an option—it is a necessity. 

If you have any questions, please reach out to Policy@digitalchamber.org. 

Who We Are 

The Digital Chamber (TDC) advocates for national and international standards that leverage blockchain’s inherent strengths to mitigate AI’s greatest risks and unleash AI’s economic dynamism. 

Citations 

1. Parametrix Insurance, “Cloud Outage and the Fortune 500”, 2023.