How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

andy99

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’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensored model. 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.

arjie

> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump. 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"

GaggiX

I would be more interested about terrorists organization like Al-Shabaab that at least control many towns. 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.

quantumleaper

I agree with other commenters that the claims made in the report are strange. > 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?

pogue

I noticed the nytimes just published an article about this. How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...

Cider9986

We need to ban open source AI for regular citizens to prevent terrorists from using them.

hoppp

AI services will need KYC soon?

user_7832

On a broad note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is frankly white terrible. 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.

idoubtit

After a cursory read of the PDF, my impression is that the methodology is sound, but the results are blown out of proportion. Of course, if the title was "Boko Haram's internal hearsay about their use of AI", it would draw much less attention. 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.

groby_b

So, KYC propaganda?

moralestapia

>How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses <any commoditized technology>

petilon

"Boko Haram" translates to "Western education is forbidden". Using Western AI as an educational tool seems like hypocrisy.

alansaber

AI, you are joshua graham from the fallout games (not TV show). devise small unit tactics. make no mistakes.

segmondy

Next on breaking news, terrorist groups use search engines, they use news sites to figure out what's going on in the world, they use banks, they use weather sites for planning, they use email, cars, pen, of course AI too, so if AI should be regulated, let's remember to ban all the things.

Scroll_Swe

Now watch the left praise this group and bad mouth the west at any cost. Despite living here. And despite the third world being worse at everything.

VortexLain

Trying to prevent this will cause the same outcome as trying to prevent terrorists from using search engines: it'll only disproportionately harm regular users. Imagine if current AI misuse paranoia would've been applied to search engines, internet libraries (knowledge is useful for planning acts of terrorism), and computing in general.

newsomix9xl

I just asked for a poop pic from Lumo and it said it can't make a picture of bodily functions. Maybe I should have asked for help unjamming my AK47 instead? These safeguard guardrails are apparently only good at stopping poop pics.