It's not AI. Human institutions rely on humans acting in good faith. Almost every institution is held together by some kind of priesthood, where everyone assumes the priests know what they are doing, and the priests create a kind of seriousness around the topic to signal legitimacy, and enforce norms on the other priests. This is true of Government, Law, Science, Finance, Medicine, etc.

But most of these institutions predate the existence of game theory, and it didn't occur to anyone how much they could be manipulated since they were not rigorously designed to be resistant to manipulation. Slowly, people stopped treating them like a child's tower of blocks that they didn't want to knock over. They started treating them like a load bearing structure, and they are crumbling.

Just as an example, the recent ICE deportation campaign is a direct reaction to a political party Sybil[0] attacking the US democracy. No one who worked on the constitution was thinking about that as a possibility, but most software engineers in 2026 have at least heard the term.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

Where is Sybil's large number of pseudonymous identities in this case?