International Association for Computing and Philosophy - Annual Conference 2026

The Role of Ethical Principles in AI for Cybersecurity
2026-07-16 , Executive Conference Room

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity has introduced ethical challenges that need to be addressed before these AI-driven systems can be deployed in a production environment. The delegation of morally significant actions to non-human agents without human oversight raises questions about fairness, privacy, security, safety, and responsibility. This paper will examine these questions through an ethical analysis of an AI-driven cybersecurity scenario to explore how the embedding of AI in such systems raises ethical issues. The paper will apply a set of ethics principles to an AI-driven cybersecurity scenario to demonstrate the ethical soundness of these ethics principles. For each AI ethics principle, the analysis will attempt to address three questions: What does the principle say? How does the principle apply to the scenario? What evidence in the scenario supports its relevance? There has not been any work that has applied ethics principles to scenarios depicting moral dilemmas involving AI for cybersecurity. This paper is a step in this direction. The moral dilemma in the scenario concerns deception. Is it ethical to deploy an AI-Powered Honeypot that deceives customers into revealing private information if the aim is to force attackers to reveal their malicious intent? This moral dilemma demonstrates a broader problem in the use of AI for cybersecurity, namely, the difficulty of balancing competing commitments.