Experts: AI, encrypted messaging platforms, and drones pose new terrorism threats

The warnings arrive on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the starting point is a decline in one kind of danger: analysts said the global jihadi movement is now fractured and lacks the capacity to launch operations as sophisticated as those attacks. The comparison the experts reach for is the 9/11 Commission Report, which criticized a "failure of imagination" before the attacks. Their argument, made in Foreign Policy, is that the West should apply the same lens to its own innovations, which they say are continuously misused by terrorists against it.

What makes the warnings concrete rather than abstract is the claim that AI has already been used to plan deadly attacks on US soil. Alongside encrypted messaging platforms and drones, the experts describe these tools as "force multipliers." The body goes further on drones specifically: Council on Foreign Relations experts said the gap between the drone threat and the response is significant and remains unaddressed.

The stakes, as the body frames them, hinge on whether that acknowledged drone gap is closed, and on how governments weigh the misuse of their own technologies against the threats. National security and counterterrorism officials would be the ones acting on that, though the body does not specify any planned measures, timeline, or figure.