July 2025 Workshop on AI and Terrorism, Held at The University of Newcastle, UK, Brings Together Practitioners, Scholars, and Regulators
- levensondaniel
- Jul 19
- 2 min read
Blog Post
By Daniel E. Levenson
July 19, 2025
On July 1 of this year I had the privilege of running a workshop on potential terrorist malicious use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) along with Dr. Kevin Blasiak, Post Doctoral Researcher in computer science at the Center for Technology and Society at TU Wien. The workshop was held at the annual European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies conference which took place this year at the University of Newcastle, in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England.Our conference paper, entitled “Shifting the Conversation on Malicious Use of AI: A Value-Sensitive Approach for Stakeholder Consensus” provided a framework for the day’s activities.
The goal was to challenge the participants, which included individuals working in law enforcement, government regulation, and international NGO’s, (and hailing from 10 different countries) to engage in substantive discussion around malicious terrorist use of AI and the likely impacts on a wide range of stakeholders.
The origins of the overall project are rooted in the Sandpit competition held at the 2024 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference at Swansea University in Wales. The day after the official end of the conference a sandpit competition was held in which participants formed small working groups based on areas of mutual interest at the intersection of terrorism and technology, and through a highly interactive, expertly facilitated process, developed project proposals for funding consideration. The proposal we developed, which looked at potential malicious use of AI by terrorists, was chosen for funding, and over the course of the last year we have delved into this topic, seeking to better identify and understand the various stakeholders and how they view both this problem and potential solutions to issues in this space.
This opportunity is representative of the kind of innovative, collaborative opportunities that Swansea University emphasizes, reflect in this conference and the sandpit competition, as well as the Cyber Threats Research Center (CYTREC) and its involvement in the Vox-Pol Network, both of which encourage scholars working in a range of relevant fields to think collaboratively about ways we can increase our understanding of, as well as ways to mitigate, the impact of extremist violence.While we are still evaluating the data and feedback collected during the workshop, the fact that we could get such a diverse group of professionals together to discuss this issue of common concern in my mind speaks to the relevance of the topic, as well as the seriousness with which leading thinkers in a variety of spaces are concerned about the misuse of this increasingly ubiquitous technology.
