World powers are already in "some sort of cyber Cold War," and western nations should stop offering "futile compromises" to Russia and China on matters such as election interference, chess legend Garry Kasparov says.
"Right now we are in some sort of cyber Cold War, and deterrence is the only response," Kasparov told reporters in Paris last week, reports CNBC. "It seems like there's no political will to make such a strong statement."
Kasparov, who won one match and lost a second to IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer in the late 1990s, had been asked about the possibility of artificial intelligence being used in cyber attacks.
"We should stop wasting our time talking of killer robots and terminators," he said. "No matter how sophisticated algorithms may be, it still needs a bad human actor."
New technologies will give new opportunities to "bad actors," he also said, and nations like Russia and China will continue to "break the rules."
The Russian champion is now a security ambassador for antivirus maker Avast and a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has warned often about Moscow's election meddling. His comments come as the trade war between the United States and China grows, and as Washington pushes for the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou to face charges of violating sanctions against Iran.
President Donald Trump has added Huawei to a trade blacklist and last week declared a national emergency over cybersecurity, barring companies in the United States from using telecommunications equipment made by firms that pose a national security risk.