“God has helped us, and so will AI”: How the Terrorist Group Boko Haram Uses Frontier AI
Antonia Juelich
ABSTRACT:
How are terrorists using AI? Semi-structured interviews with 27 former Boko Haram members conducted in northeast Nigeria in 2025 and 2026 reveal unprecedented detail about AI-assisted terrorist activity primarily through 2024. This report finds that both factions of Boko Haram use frontier AI, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek, to assist in combat and day-to-day operations. This AI use is institutionalized through specialized units and internal training. It has aided in attack planning, weapons troubleshooting, and the design of explosive devices, as users have successfully circumvented some safeguards. This know-how was transferred through transnational jihadist networks, with Islamic State operatives delivering in-person training. Respondents expressed strong enthusiasm for AI and, in some cases, openness to mass-casualty weapons, though documented use remains conventional. Terrorist adoption of AI has thus advanced further and more systematically than prior analysis has recognized, making it a present and growing reality that warrants attention from policymakers, security communities, and AI developers.
Antonia Juelich is the International Security Lead at the Cambridge Programme on AI Science & Policy (CASP). Previously, she was an International Security Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Antonia is a political scientist whose work examines the intersection of international security, political violence, and risks created by frontier AI, with a focus on AI misuse by terrorist organizations. Her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and recognized with awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.
From GLP-1s to wearables, gyms, CPG, healthtech, activewear, and beyond, here are the moments that mattered this year, and the macroshifts b
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CivicScience engages directly with consumers, collecting over one million survey responses daily, to turn real-time insights into high-perfo
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the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.
On/Off buttons of a train's destination sign control panel.
Pressing the On button (green) is an idempotent operation, since it has the same effect whether done once or multiple times. Likewise, pressing Off is idempotent.
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