From the article:

When a gang of motorcycle-riding members of Boko Haram attacked a military base in eastern Nigeria a couple of years ago, they were stymied by a defensive trench surrounding the complex.

The extremists regrouped. Before launching another assault, they asked A.I. for help.

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The episode, recounted in a research paper by Dr. Juelich shared with The New York Times ahead of its publication on Friday, highlights how generative artificial intelligence tools are increasingly aiding terrorist groups directly on the battlefield, experts say, despite efforts by their makers to safeguard them from misuse.

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Dr. Juelich conducted nearly 60 interviews with 27 former members of Boko Haram in Nigeria over the past year. Her field research found that terrorists were using chatbots to design explosives, fix or upgrade other weapons, and brainstorm ideas on how to attack their enemies.

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Large-language models, Dr. Juelich writes in her report, have been “consulted at every stage of military activity — in mission preparation, during operations and in post-mission analysis — representing a different picture from the propaganda-focused A.I. use that dominates the public discourse and existing public research.”

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“The terrorists are not waiting for us to make A.I. safe,” Dr. Juelich said in an interview, adding that their use of A.I. had been “significantly underestimated in both scope and character.”

Daniel Byman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University and co-author of a report about A.I. and the future of terrorism released on Friday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said terrorist groups were “mixing and matching” from different A.I. systems, seeking to avoid technical guardrails established by the A.I. companies. Dr. Juelich’s research also found that Boko Haram was platform agnostic, interchangeably working with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok, as well as the Chinese firm DeepSeek.

The methods described to Dr. Juelich generally run through the end of 2024. A.I. companies have released several iterations of their chatbot models since then, and generally said that while they had grown more powerful, they also came with stronger safety measures. They have also noted that some malicious functions of A.I. are “dual use,” meaning that the information shared can go toward legitimate purposes as well. Learning to jump a motorcycle, for example, is not inherently harmful or violent.

Other cases described by erstwhile Boko Haram members appeared more explicitly intended for violence, however.

“You type in the question or use your voice and it gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?,’ and then it tells you how,” one former commander in Islamic State West Africa Province, a main faction of Boko Haram, told Dr. Juelich last year of using an A.I. chatbot. “It is like a human robot! We used it a lot.”

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Karl Ryan, a Google spokesman, pushed back against the research, saying that the company’s technical experts had reviewed the work and “found the responses were neither specific nor detailed enough to result in misuse.” He added that Google had “strict policies prohibiting the use of Gemini to cause real-world harm.” Both Anthropic and Google were briefed on the findings by Dr. Juelich before their publication.

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Not everyone agrees that safeguards are improving. The nonprofit Future of Life Institute graded the major A.I. firms on their safety commitments this week and concluded that they had mostly eroded across the industry since last year. While most earned middling marks, xAI and DeepSeek received failing grades.

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Tech Against Terrorism, an international counterterrorism nonprofit supported by the United Nations, last week released results from A.I. tests gauging how more than two dozen leading models responded to thousands of prompts drawn from real-world terrorism cases. The tests were met with “full refusals” just 57 percent of the time. While prompts about explosives were declined about 80 percent of the time, improvised chemical weapons were only about a third of the time, the group said.

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Artificial intelligence is unlikely to transform terrorism overnight, analysts and U.S. officials say. Terrorist organizations typically adopt technology cautiously, selectively and pragmatically.

But the testimonials that Dr. Juelich collected depict both eagerness and dedication among Boko Haram cells. Defectors recounted attending organized training sessions focused on how to best leverage the powers of generative A.I. models to inform or enhance their uses of the technology.