Experts Warn AI, Drones Fuel Next Terror Wave

Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, terrorism analysts say the threat to the United States has not shrunk — it has splintered and gone high-tech.

Security experts marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 warn that artificial intelligence, cheap drones and encrypted messaging apps now give terrorists capabilities that did not exist in 2001 — and that Washington has not caught up.

The global jihadi movement is fractured and lacks the capacity to mount an operation as sophisticated as 9/11, analysts told Semafor, but they argue Western societies face equally dangerous threats from those technologies.

Writing in Foreign Policy, experts said the West should ask how its own "innovations are continuously misused by terrorists against it," calling AI, encrypted platforms and drones "force multipliers" for bad actors — an echo of the 9/11 Commission's "failure of imagination."

Council on Foreign Relations analysts were blunter: the "gap between the drone threat and the response is significant and... remains unaddressed."

The New Threat Map

A Center for Strategic & International Studies report in May identified four strains of terrorism now facing the country: anti-government extremism, partisan extremism, jihadism and white supremacy.

Semafor reported that AI has already been used to help plan deadly attacks on US soil. Former New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told the New York Daily News the country has not yet seen its first drone terror attack.

"Twenty five years after 9/11 it is an expanding threat, rather than a diminishing one because of the multiplicity of ways things can be carried out," Bratton said. "The good news is there's a lot more tools to work with, but the bad news is [terrorists] also have access to those tools."