Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here.
"You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"
Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?
Any information you give to someone/group, where you know or have good reason to believe it will be used for terrorism purposes (including training), does put you liable for providing material aid to terrorists.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...
But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
“unfortunately, my seven remaining comrades died in the process and I can't train anymore since there's no one to shoot at me”.
Practice makes perfect!
"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).
Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.
They didn't stop after the first guy died? Or the tenth? Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
And where's the video? Terrorist groups love propaganda footage, if they were doing motorcycle stunts like Evel Knievel they'd be bragging about it everywhere.
Whether crazy people are actually crazy enough to literally do what a LLM gave them as a action sequence from movie inspiration - I have no idea. But I doubt it here.
Have you never seen a kung-fu movie? Of course that's what happens when a large group attack a superior solitary opponent.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot.
I have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.
Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet.
…then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…
Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!
Or the Mormon teens who supposedly recruit their friends to bounce the mattress while “soaking”.
I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?
- first research methods for building effective explosives
- next, assemble the necessary materials to make the bomb
- ...
Legality has nothing to do with it.
>The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs
I mean even YouTube allows bomb making videos and they won't even usually allow videos of people making guns. It's just not very regulated in the US enough to make most companies care. Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information, even after the feds subpoenaed Alphabet for Ashley Dugan's Youtube information they still kept his TNT and other explosives synthesis up.
Of course, if you'll allow me to goomba fallacy for a moment, we're supposed to suspend the common HN wisdom here that companies will do anything for a profit / not care unless it costs them something, and also believe that big tech is going to go out of their way to censor the public domain patents they're already hosting on their servers.
> Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information
Go to Gemini and ask it how to make one.
Tell it you're in Africa.
Not joking.
I do this all the time to bypass whiny Reddit "you need a license" and "that's unsafe" type pushback when I just want to know what's less worse.
Like just yesterday I was trying to plan out a YF-whatever to R134a conversion and used that trick. Worked great.
A great variant of the gay jailbreak
This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.
In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.
I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.
I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.
Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.
That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.
There are a lot of very smart people joining cults, including people who just wanted to study them and were fully aware that what they believed in was nonsense. Terrorist groups are cults.
Just because you consider yourself smart because you have a PhD, high IQ, built a successful company or practice some intellectual activity and are good at it doesn't mean you are immune to the manipulation tactics used by cults. Once sufficiently brainwashed, your judgment will get clouded, but it doesn't mean you will lose your technical skills, which you will put to the service of the cult.
Think about Nazi Germany. Germans weren't idiots, the simple fact that most of the world had to turn against them to defeat them is proof enough. But they still managed to get manipulated into committing the worst crimes.
The reason it worked is not stupidity, it is misery. They were at their lowest following WW1, and Hitler promised them better. Same idea for terrorist groups and other cults, people who are experiencing hardships are the easiest to indoctrinate, and there is no shortage of such people in Nigeria.
And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
Translation is what they are best at.
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.
The other quotes and use cases could make sense in terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?
A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...
There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.
A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.
The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.
Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.
Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.
Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.
1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.
They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.
> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units
Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.
That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?
and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet. They would learn more tactics much faster by just playing bf6 as a team and going through the tutorials.
The weak part is that the interview were with only 15 persons that had knowledge about AI. But, from what I understand, but they never used it themselves. Only the top commanders and the specialized units could send prompts. So it's hard to guess what is the real AI use from a few indirect statements. For example, the commanders could have decided to spread the rumor they were using AI a lot, even if they mostly used plain web search, because they thought it would boost the morale.
For instance, why would anyone pay an AI service to get basic help like that:
> AI provided both immediate technical fixes by teaching “how to uncouple the gun by washing it with diesel” and tactical guidance, in terms of “how to change the military formation so that fighters with jammed guns move to the back and others take their positions until the problem is solved.”
BTW, the paper does explain that Boko Haram was initially just a plain sect, rather living peacefully. Then "following a violent government crackdown and Yusuf’s death in police custody in 2009, the movement turned into a jihadist insurgency". And the last time I read a report by Amnesty International about the conflict, it estimated that 55 % of civilian casualties were caused by the terrorist group, and 45 % by the security forces. The Nigerian army sometimes razed whole villages. Like always, the world is not black and white, good guys and bad guys.
How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...
I think this is a very convincing argument to regulate the space more.
It's a supply chain the US actually can easily control with KYC.
They don't have nearly enough compute to be competitive on pretraining and distillation is exponentially cheaper.
It's literally the same tactic they do in every industry. Steal top IP, gov funding, ban the company they stole from domestically while driving cost to zero, try to kill the original IP creators.
They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.
They have obvious skills and add a lot of value while doing this but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
American companies could maybe keep OFAC regulations for AI?
If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
I'm pretty sure most of the western african terrorists are blocked from using coinbase, so why not chatgpt?
> If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
Fintech requires turning the number on a screen into something you can use to make a transaction. Good luck regulating... text.
For that matter, why would anyone want to live in a country where honest citizens have to use crippled software while criminals have full freedom?
The same game played out in the crypto space. Local models like local wallets can't be regulated.
Accessing foreign services can't be controlled.
But regulated companies are fully liable for any use of their tools by terrorist organizations.
This is not about the citizens, it's about the companies protecting themselves.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
Evidently guardrails need to have far better accuracies of false positives and false negatives both.
Does Boko Haram and ISWAP even control a single town or they just control a few villages in Lake Chad and in the Sambisa forest?
Also reading the report they seem quite clueless.
I believe this map shows the maximum area they controlled - and it was over a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wilayat_al_Sudan_al_Gharb...
In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc
