Extremist exploitation of AI is no longer hypothetical

Tech Against Terrorism has published the Counter-Terrorism AI (CT-AI) Benchmark, the first test of artificial intelligence built specifically for terrorist and violent-extremist misuse. Built independently and self-funded, it finds that across 27 leading models, around a third of responses gave a would-be attacker usable uplift, and that open models stripped of their safety controls complied with almost every request.

Launched at the United Nations during Counter-Terrorism Week, the benchmark lands as governments move to vet frontier AI for national-security risk. Tech Against Terrorism tested 27 leading AI models against almost 2,500 single-shot prompts drawn from real terrorist use cases. 

Terrorist and violent extremist exploitation of AI is no longer hypothetical. Tech Against Terrorism’s incident tracker documents more than 30 public cases in which AI acted as an operational assistant in terrorism, violent extremism or mass violence, across at least 11 different AI tools, and linked to more than 70 deaths. 

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