Safety, Security, and Cognitive Risks in World Models

arXiv:2604.01346v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: World models - learned internal simulators of environment dynamics - are rapidly becoming foundational to autonomous decision-making in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and agentic AI. By predicting future states in compressed latent spaces, they enable sample-efficient planning and long-horizon imagination without direct environment interaction. Yet this predictive power introduces a distinctive set of safety, security, and cognitive risks