From Dual-Use Awareness to Dual-Use Agency: Epistemic Distance and the Structural Limits of Ethical Responsibility in AI Research

Contemporary AI research is increasingly implicated in military and surveillance systems, often through indirect civilian pathways rather than explicit defense programs. Existing responses to this dual-use challenge have focused primarily on improving researcher awareness and ethical reflection. In this paper, we argue that such approaches overlook a more fundamental constraint: researchers frequently lack the institutional capacity to influence how their work is ultimately deployed. We introduce the concept of a dual-use agency gap to describe this mismatch between ethical responsibility and practical control. We further argue that this gap is produced by epistemic distance—the growing separation between sites of AI research and sites of deployment. Drawing on recent scholarship on surveillance pipelines, foundation models, and professional responsibility, we show how contemporary research infrastructures systematically limit researchers’ ability to contest or refuse downstream military and surveillance uses. We conclude by outlining modest, community-level interventions aimed at preserving researcher agency and supporting peace-oriented AI research grounded in harm prevention.