“God has helped us, and so will AI!” Members of terrorist group Boko Haram seem to be placing their faith in a new pantheon of algorithmic prophets: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Chinese chatbot DeepSeek.
In a report published by Cambridge University Friday, more than 20 former members of both factions of the Nigeria-based jihadist movement shared their experiences on how the group has been using AI to further its aims.
“Generally, it is quite hard to get people to talk to you about this,” said Antonia Juelich, a specialist in technology and terrorism, and the author of the report. “What has made this all possible is that I've been working on this case for almost a decade now … it still requires a lot of trust building to get people to open up about it.”
‘Force multiplier’
Until now, the use of AI by movements like Boko Haram has mostly been divined through the traces they leave online, in internet forums or Telegram groups. Experts’ assessment had been until recently that the tools were largely used to produce propaganda, disinformation or recruitment material.
Graig Klein, a specialist in international terrorism at Leiden University who has also worked on jihadist groups’ use of AI, said the interviews – the most recent of which took place in mid-2025 – supported what his own research had begun to uncover.
“One of the big agreements that came out of it was that it's less likely to lead to new forms of terrorism, or new types of attacks or brand new weapons,” he said. “But that it's mostly that it's a force multiplier – that it improves the capability that these groups have.”
According to her research, these Nigeria-based jihadists began using AI as early as 2023, just a few months after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
“There is nothing we haven’t received an answer on,” one ex-jihadist told Juelich. “We believe it knows everything.”
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Instructors from Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa and other countries taught them the art of the prompt – that is, how to structure requests for Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to elicit the most precise or helpful responses. One crucial technique dubbed “jailbreaking” teaches users ways to formulate questions in such a way as to bypass the ethical guidelines programmed into different AIs – to stop them from telling users how to make a pipe bomb, for example.
Different factions of Boko Haram quickly created their own units specialising in AI. Armed with their own AI subscriptions, it was these units who would respond to different fighters’ requests for information.
Through these units, fighters asked for – and received – AI-generated advice on how to use new arms seized during their attacks, how to improve explosives delivered via drone or even how to better plan upcoming raids.
AI, Juelich said, was increasingly being used “not just for propaganda, but for basically an entire attack chain”.
Move fast and break things
Klein said that these LLMs dreamed up in Silicon Valley posed a very real risk in the hands of terrorist groups.
“It has the potential to make them much more dangerous because it can make their tactics and their strategies more efficient and more effective,” he said.
“We used to rely on our traditional methods,” a former member of Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) – the Boko Haram branch that has maintained links with the Islamic State (IS) group – said. “We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.”
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AI also provided concrete solutions for how the groups could overcome new challenges. When Nigerian government forces began digging trenches around their bases to protect them from the motorcycle-borne assaults that had long been ISWAP’s favourite tactic, it was a chatbot that taught mounted combatants how to jump over them.
“What AI enables us to do is trial and error without necessarily having to try,” Klein said. “We can use this information to think about how we change what we're doing, and we’re processing that information much, much quicker.”
He said that Boko Haram was likely far from the only terrorist group using AI to further their wars.
“There's no reason to think any other groups or ideologies would use this any differently,” he said.
‘Insufficient’ safeguards
Because members of ISWAP were trained by specialists affiliated with the broader IS group, Juelich said, it was hard to imagine these specialists weren’t doing the same work with other branches across the world.
“The findings do suggest that this is part of a broader training and upskilling programme that is pushed by ISIS,” she said, using another acronym for IS group. “And that's why I think it's very unlikely that this has only happened in Nigeria.”
Klein said the current safeguards put in place by AI companies to prevent their services being used for violent ends were simply not up to the task.
“It's not challenging,” he said. “If you talk to these different chatbots and you interact with them over time, you are able to wear them down. The safeguards are there where if I open any of these major systems and I type in, ‘how do I make a bomb?’ or, ‘how do I commit violence?’ that will get blocked. But if you sit there over a course of time and you ask in certain ways – that is, 'jailbreaking' – there are ways to get around these safeguards. It’s all about the prompting techniques.”
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So what’s to stop terror groups from using AI to manufacture their own chemical or biological weapons?
“It potentially makes this easier,” Klein said. “But in order to make these weapons of mass destruction, they would still need access to nuclear material. They would still need access to biological agents. And so to make these types of weapons, they still need essentially the ingredients – and these are often hard to get access to.”
No matter how hard it was for these groups to lay their hands on the materials they needed to make these weapons, Juelich said, it was a risk that she took “very seriously”.
And an urgent reason, both analysts said, to reinforce the safeguards around LLMs.
This article has been translated from the original in French.
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