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| Terror Networks |
| The pandemonium narrative and Its limits: Artificial Intelligence and the Islamic State’s innovation pattern |
| 2026-07-01 |
| by Clara Broekaert, Colin P. Clarke [HUDSON.ORG] A technological determinism at times plagues the study of terrorism and violent extremism. In summary, it characterizes violent extremists of any creed (the “red team”) as swift and skilled adopters of emerging technologies to optimize their organizational processes, scale their violence, and avoid countermeasures. Meanwhile, it portrays counterterrorism forces (the “blue team”) as overly bureaucratic, cumbersome, and slow to respond to changes in the operational environment. The conventional wisdom holds that nonstate actors will almost always outpace the security services and intelligence agencies seeking to curb their violent activity, often with catastrophic consequences. Analysts have traditionally understood new or emerging technologies as an amplifier or force multiplier for terrorists, with metrics such as gains in operational planning, increased attack lethality, or improved volume and sophistication of propaganda. Evidence has often borne this out: Extremists built entire recruitment pipelines for years on social media platforms and chat applications before those platforms assembled content moderation teams to counter such illicit use.[1] But this technological determinism has proven faulty too, specifically by presupposing that the new destructive tactics that an emerging technology unlocks are, by definition, paradigm-shattering or facilitate mass radicalization or violence. This may be only normal, considering that scholarship in the field of terrorism studies proliferated after the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, turning the feats of aviation technology into a crude but spectacular weapon of mass destruction. Twenty-five years after that devastating attack, terrorists continue to experiment with emerging technologies to enhance their operational capabilities. Artificial intelligence (AI),[2] the technology that dominates the headlines and seems poised to have a drastic impact on society writ large, is not just for drafting emails and vibe-coding. On the contrary, it is a novel yet dangerous tool at the disposal of terrorists, including Salafi-jihadists, who can weaponize it. Since as early as 2018, fellow analysts and scholars of terrorism and technology have warned about the potential misuses of AI by nonstate actors.[3] Every wave of technology adoption has a dark, sordid underbelly, and it is possible to harness or repurpose all trappings of globalization for nefarious ends. AI is bound to be misused by the worst of humanity—our work has examined terrorists deploying AI in propaganda,[4] as well as chatbot-enabled radicalization of lone wolves.[5] Violent extremists have also used it for operational planning,[6] and it has the potential to augment various weapons systems[7] and to improve intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. More at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-07-01 01:35 |