Ongoing Projects
ICCT and Leiden University decided to organise a pioneering platform to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and terrorism. This initiative addresses the critical question of how terrorist actors might exploit AI capabilities to enhance their strategies, tactics, and objectives. The project aims to anticipate future challenges and explore potential scenarios. It emphasises the importance of addressing potential threats proactively rather than responding retroactively, which has been a common critique in terrorism studies.
To this end, ICCT and Leiden University hosted a two-day 'Blue Sky’ Workshop, which combines forward-thinking from diverse and multidisciplinary perspectives. The workshop is intended to identify the most likely and most impactful scenarios of the use of AI in the global security space, the starting base upon which multidisciplinary collaborative research on counter-measures to deter, prevent, or disrupt such scenarios could eventually be conducted.
This project is funded by the Dutch Coordinator for Security and Terrorism (NCTV).
Highlights
About the project
Extra body
The project led to interesting insights, threat assessments, and hopeful and dystopian scenarios encompassing multiple aspects of terrorists’ and violent extremists’ exploitation of AI. As a result of its open-minded ‘blue-sky’ approach, participants were able to consider a much broader range of topics and scenarios, providing numerous potential avenues for future investigation and collaboration. The diverse input from experts in several fields related to terrorist exploitation of AI has further stressed both the need for and interest in this type of collaboration, demonstrating the success of this two-day event. It is the aim of the organisers to use this as a launching point for further work, which would then focus on how such scenarios could be countered or mitigated.
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