Nigerian jihadist groups have “institutionalized” the use of commercial AI chatbots, deploying them for tasks ranging from battlefield strategy to bombmaking, according to a new study whose author warns that the pace of adoption has outrun the safeguards Big Tech has put in place.
The study, published last week by Antonia Juelich, a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University, is based on interviews with ex-militants from both Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and its rival Jama’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihad (JAS), better known as Boko Haram. It covers AI use from 2023 through 2024, with one respondent’s account extending into 2025.
“AI adoption by terrorist groups has been much faster, more extensive and more systematic than we thought,” Juelich told AFP in an interview. “It’s not just some individual commanders who became aware of AI, but they have really institutionalized it, in terms of having dedicated units” working with AI and organizing training on chatbot use.
Foreign trainers, one former ISWAP militant told Juelich, “assembled the top people in a room. They used a projector to show how it works on a big screen.”
While the internet and battle-hardened commanders have long served as knowledge conduits for jihadist groups, Juelich said the “step-by-step instructions” now available from chatbots — and the ability to ask specific questions — represent something novel. The study logged ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek as being used by militants.
The uses documented in the study span both the mundane and the lethal. Confronted with military trench defences, one ex-ISWAP member told Juelich: “We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this.” After repeated practice, he said, “the next time we attacked, we could jump.”
More seriously, chatbots have been used to introduce new types of explosive devices and to improve existing ones. “AI told us what chemicals to put in that made the explosion heavier,” a former JAS commander was quoted as saying. Other respondents described using AI to study battlefield tactics that could reduce casualties among their own fighters.
The research lands as the leadership of major AI companies has repeatedly warned that their technology could pose existential risks while promising that safeguards are embedded in their products. Juelich argued that the study exposes a gap between those assurances and what commercial systems will actually help with. Some queries the militants surfaced — such as how to jump a motorcycle over a trench — are not necessarily nefarious in themselves, she noted. “But explosives don’t fall into that category and that’s where safeguards should kick in, and they haven’t,” she said.
Juelich cautioned that because her interviews cover use through 2024 and largely predate the most recent generation of safety measures, some of the specific failures her respondents describe may since have been closed. “But I’m worried about the trajectory, where terrorist groups embrace AI and the safeguards are not strong enough,” she said.
The findings arrive as the Nigerian state has been moving in the opposite direction on the same technology, contracting AI-powered surveillance and command systems to shore up border security against the same insurgent groups. The Ministry of Defence signed a $190 million agreement with UK-based MARSS Group earlier this year to deploy an AI-driven Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence infrastructure across the country — a state-side AI build-out that now runs in parallel with the insurgent-side AI adoption the Juelich study documents.
Africa’s most populous country has been entrenched in an insurgency since 2009, and technological adaptation by militants is not itself new — from propaganda spread through online messaging platforms to recreational drones repurposed for combat. What Juelich’s respondents describe is the next step: not one-off experimentation, but a top-down organizational focus on AI that, in her framing, mirrors the way the world’s largest corporations have embraced the same tools.
