Federal cybersecurity and homeland security agencies are warning that artificial intelligence is already being used to help hackers and violent extremists plan and carry out attacks on American infrastructure, and officials say the threat is happening now rather than sometime down the road. The warnings, issued around the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, describe a landscape where AI tools can shorten the planning time for both cyberattacks and physical violence.
According to fedscoop.com, hackers are targeting water, food, energy, chemical, manufacturing and commercial facilities by going after Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers, the industrial devices that run critical equipment behind the scenes. The agencies involved in the warning — the NSA, CISA, the FBI, the Energy Department and the EPA — described these attacks as an active threat rather than a theoretical one, the outlet reported.
Those agencies said AI is dramatically reducing the technical expertise and time required to develop working industrial-control-system exploitation scripts and malicious tools, according to the same report. The alert also warned that AI lets adversaries rapidly deploy new attack methods and adjust on the fly when defenses change, with consequences that could include disrupted industrial processes, safety incidents, or compromised sensitive data.
A Widening Terrorism Threat Tied to the 9/11 Anniversary
Separately, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said terrorists are increasingly experimenting with generative AI to create violent propaganda and to explore using explosives and biological agents in attacks, as reported by abcnews.com. The spokesperson warned that advances in AI could make terrorist activity faster, more scalable and harder to detect.
Federal authorities said foreign terrorist organizations continue to encourage attacks inside the United States and have previously released propaganda timed to 9/11 anniversaries, per the same report. Officials described the overall U.S. terrorism threat environment as heightened and increasingly complex compared with the period before the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The concerns echo language in the Department of Homeland Security's own threat assessment, which stated that a range of violent extremists will increasingly attempt to use AI to augment attack plans, fill gaps in technical expertise, and expand their reach, according to a Department of Homeland Security assessment. The FBI has separately said AI provides augmented and enhanced capabilities to schemes attackers already use, increasing the speed, scale and automation of cyberattacks, according to the FBI.
Researchers See AI Reinforcing Old Tactics, Not Inventing New Ones
A separate analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies takes a more measured view, concluding that AI is more likely to reinforce existing terrorism trends — decentralization, lone-actor violence, digital propaganda and information warfare — than to create entirely new forms of terrorism, according to csis.org. The organization notes that AI lowers barriers by letting smaller groups and individuals do tasks that once required more manpower, technical know-how, time and money.
CSIS found that AI's biggest impact is likely to fall on propaganda, recruitment, radicalization, operational support, disinformation and organizational upkeep rather than on building novel weapons. The analysis also expects terrorist organizations to rely overwhelmingly on commercial models, open-source tools and widely available platforms rather than developing frontier AI systems of their own, since generative AI already dramatically cuts the cost of producing persuasive text, images, audio, video, memes, translations and graphic design at scale.
For context on how attacks have actually unfolded, CSIS notes that guns and several types of bombs accounted for more than 80 percent of all terrorist attacks over the last decade. The same analysis points to a 2023 incident in which Lashkar-e-Taiba reportedly used a drone to drop one of its members into Punjab, and discusses the group's technological adaptation.
Together, the warnings from federal agencies and the CSIS research paint a picture of a threat that is evolving in speed and scale even as the underlying tactics remain familiar. Officials continue to frame the danger to infrastructure systems, in particular, as an immediate operational concern rather than a distant hypothetical.
