Before Las Vegas, Intel Analysts Warned That Bomb Makers Were Turning to AI

Using a series of prompts six days before he died by suicide outside the main entrance of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Matthew Livelsberger, a highly decorated US Army Green Beret from Colorado, consulted with an artificial intelligence on the best ways to turn a rented Cybertruck into a four-ton vehicle-borne explosive. According to documents obtained exclusively by WIRED, US intelligence analysts have been issuing warnings about this precise scenario over the past year—and among their concerns are that AI tools could be used by racially or ideologically motivated extremists to target critical infrastructure, in particular the power grid.

“We knew that AI was going to change the game at some point or another in, really, all of our lives,” Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told reporters on Tuesday. “Absolutely, it’s a concerning moment for us.”

Copies of his exchanges with OpenAI’s ChatGPT show that Livelsberger, 37, pursued information on how to amass as much explosive material as he legally could while en route to Las Vegas, as well as how best to set it off using the Desert Eagle gun discovered in the Cybertruck following his death. Screenshots shared by McMahill’s office reveal Livelsberger prompting ChatGPT for information on Tannerite, a reactive compound typically used for target practice. In one such prompt, Livelsberger asks, “How much Tannerite is equivalent to 1 pound of TNT?” He follows up by asking how it might be ignited at “point blank range.”

The documents obtained by WIRED show that concerns about the threat of AI being used to help commit serious crimes, including terrorism, have been circulating among US law enforcement. They reveal that the Department of Homeland Security has persistently issued warnings about domestic extremists who are relying on the technology to “generate bomb making instructions” and develop “general tactics for conducting attacks against the United States.”

The memos, which are not classified but are restricted to government personnel, state that violent extremists are increasingly turning to tools like ChatGPT to help stage attacks aimed at collapsing American society through acts of domestic terror.

According to notes investigators found on his phone, Livelsberger intended the bombing as a “wake-up call” to Americans, whom he urged to reject diversity, embrace masculinity, and rally around president-elect Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He also urged Americans to purge Democrats from the federal government and the military, calling for a “hard reset.”

While McMahill contended Tuesday that the incident in Las Vegas may be the first “on US soil where ChatGPT was utilized to help an individual build a particular device,” federal intelligence analysts say extremists associated with white supremacist and accelerationist movements online are now frequently sharing access to hacked versions of AI chatbots in an effort to construct bombs with an eye to carrying out attacks against law enforcement, government facilities, and critical infrastructure.

In particular, the memos highlight the vulnerability of the US power grid, a popular target among extremists populating “Terrorgram,” a loose network of encrypted chatrooms that host a range of violent, racially-motivated individuals bent on the destruction of American democratic institutions. The documents, shared exclusively with WIRED, were first obtained by Property of the People, a nonprofit focused on national security and government transparency.