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Over the past decade, two major phenomena have developed in the digital realm. On the one hand, extremism has grown massively on the Internet, with sprawling online ecosystems hosting a wide range of radical subcultures and communities associated with both ‘stochastic terrorism’ and the ‘mainstreaming of extremism’. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undergone exponential improvement: from ChatGPT to video deepfakes, from autonomous vehicles to face-recognition CCTV systems, an array of AI technologies has abruptly entered our everyday lives. This report examines ‘AI extremism’, the toxic encounter of these two evolutions – each worrying in its own right. Like past technological progress, AI will indeed be – in fact already is – used in various ways to bolster extremist agendas. Identifying the many opportunities for action that come with a range of AI models, and linking them with different types of extremist actors, we offer a clear overview of the numerous facets of AI extremism. Building on the nascent academic and government literature on the issue as well as on our own empirical and theoretical work, we provide new typologies and concepts to help us organize our understanding of AI extremism, systematically chart its instantiations, and highlight thinking points for stakeholders in countering violent extremism.

This article deals with the online activism of Abu Jandal al-Azdi, one of the main ideologues of the now-defunct Saudi version of Al-Qa‘ida on the Arabian Peninsula (QAP), whose writings have been all but neglected in publications on this organisation. While rightly seen as only a mediocre religious scholar, I contend that al-Azdi is nevertheless an important ideologue for two reasons: firstly, his religious university education combined with his internet skills propelled him to a position that can perhaps best be described as ‘al-Qa‘ida’s editor’: he presented very few (if any) new ideas of his own but collected, selected, and presented others’ general and more difficult writings into readily-applicable and easily-digestible chunks of information – now forever present in cyberspace – that was aimed carefully and specifically at his target audience of radical Saudi Islamists; secondly, through the case-study of al-Azdi, I show that anti-Saudi ideas in QAP’s discourse – as opposed to pan-Islamism – were more prominent, more openly available and expressed at an earlier time than has hitherto been suggested, and that al-Azdi has been one of the most important ideologues promoting this.

Al-Qaeda’s media strategy in 2009 reflected the group’s attempts to meet the triple challenge of a shifting media landscape, its enmeshment in the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus, and the global jihadist movement’s failures over the last several years. The results are ambiguous. Al-Qaeda appears to be holding the attention of the faithful, but it faces a rising din of competing voices, an Internet that is more and more of a mixed blessing, and less resonance in mainstream Arab media than in years past.

Al-Qaeda’s media strategy in 2009 reflected the group’s attempts to meet the triple challenge of a shifting media landscape, its enmeshment in the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus, and the global jihadist movement’s failures over the last several years. The results are ambiguous. Al-Qaeda appears to be holding the attention of the faithful, but it faces a rising din of competing voices, an Internet that is more and more of a mixed blessing, and less resonance in mainstream Arab media than in years past.

The centrality of Arab mass media to Al-Qaeda’s political strategy has long been evident. From spectacular terror attacks designed for maximal media exposure, to carefully timed videos from Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al- Zawahiri, to the burgeoning realm of jihadi Internet forums, Al-Qaeda the organisation has increasingly become indistinguishable from Al-Qaeda the media phenomenon. This article explores the nature of Al-Qaeda’s relationship with the Arab media, which has been poorly understood leading to wrong policy conclusions.

VOX-Pol Blog post.