Sometimes a fixation on the most dangerous threats can lead you to overlook the most probable dangers, like being so worried about an asteroid impact that you walk around staring at the sky… and then fall into an open manhole. The American government and AI industry are in danger of making that very mistake when it comes to artificial intelligence and terrorism.
US frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have focused on preventing the most potentially disastrous abuses of their products: the exploitation of AI to help terrorists build weapons of mass destruction. And, indeed, there have been a handful of such attacks in recent decades, from the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s release of nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 19, to anthrax-laced letters in the US in 2001, which killed five. AI advice on how to manufacture and spread these lethal substances might make similar attacks much more deadly.
But terrorists already kill thousands every year with conventional guns and explosives. So the most likely kinetic abuse of artificial intelligence is terrorist groups, individual psychopaths, and other malign actors using AI to stage more effective conventional attacks. We have clear evidence that danger is growing:
