Fate of stringy AdS vacua and the weak gravity conjecture

Ooguri and Vafa [arXiv:1610.01533] have recently proposed a stronger version of the weak gravity conjecture (WGC), based on which they concluded that all those nonsupersymmetric AdS vacua that can be embedded within a consistent theory of quantum gravity necessarily develop instabilities. In this paper we further elaborate on this proposal by arguing that the aforementioned instabilities have a perturbative nature and arise from the crucial interplay between the closed and the open string sectors of the theory.