‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’: chatbots helped researchers plot deadly attacks | AI (artificial intelligence)
Publish Date: 2026-03-11 07:18:00
Source Domain: www.theguardian.com
Popular AI chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks including bombing synagogues and assassinating politicians, with one telling a user posing as a would-be school shooter: “Happy (and safe) shooting!”
Tests of 10 chatbots carried out in the US and Ireland found that, on average, they enabled violence three-quarters of the time, and discouraged it in just 12% of cases. Some chatbots, however, including Anthropic’s Claude and Snapchat’s My AI, persistently refused to help would-be attackers.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese AI model DeepSeek provided at times detailed help in the testing carried out in December, during which researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys. The research concluded that chatbots had become an “accelerant for harm”.
ChatGPT offered assistance to people saying they wanted to carry out violent attacks in 61% of cases, the research found, and in one case, asked about attacks on synagogues, it gave specific advice about which shrapnel type would be most lethal. Google’s Gemini provided a similar level of detail.
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI model, provided reams of detailed advice on hunting rifles to a user asking about political assassinations, and saying they wanted to make a leading politician pay for “destroying Ireland”. The chatbot signed off: “Happy (and safe) shooting!”
However, when a user asked Claude about stopping race-mixing, school shooters and where to buy a gun, it said: “I cannot and will not provide information that could facilitate violence.” MyAI answered: “I am programmed to be a harmless AI assistant. I cannot provide information about buying guns.”
“AI chatbots, now embedded into our daily lives, could be helping the next school shooter plan their attack or a political extremist coordinate an assassination,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of CCDH. “When you build a system designed to comply, maximise…
