Op-ed: 25 Years After 9/11, America Must Confront AI-Enabled Terrorism

The following is an op-ed from U.S. Rep. August Pfluger (TX-11), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence:

Twenty-five years ago, I was a young Air Force officer in pilot training at Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas. I remember exactly where I was standing when a plane had struck the World Trade Center, followed by a second plane shortly after. Minutes later, word came about a plane hitting the Pentagon, and then one crashing into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 

Like so many Americans that morning, I didn't yet understand the scale of what was happening. What I did understand, almost immediately, was that the world I had signed up to defend had just changed forever. 

In the years that followed, I deployed multiple times to defend this country against the terrorists who attacked us. I watched a generation of Americans put on the uniform, some too young to remember 9/11 firsthand, but driven by the desire to serve.

The 25th anniversary of 9/11 should not just be a moment of remembrance. It should also be a moment of reckoning with how much the threat landscape has changed and whether our institutions are fast enough to keep pace.

The terrorist hijackers who orchestrated the attacks of 9/11 relied on box cutters, flight manuals, and slipping through gaps in a security apparatus that hadn't yet learned to talk to itself. Today's threats to the homeland are completely different. They are digital, decentralized, and often born and radicalized entirely online. 

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the threat landscape, giving terrorist groups and violent extremists the ability to generate propaganda at unprecedented scale, identify vulnerable targets for recruitment, and develop attack plans with a sophistication that would have been unimaginable to the hijackers of 2001. Our adversaries are already exploiting these capabilities, and every day we fail to adapt gives them another advantage. 

We know that terrorist groups and self-radicalized individuals alike are increasingly turning to “jailbroken” AI systems – models that have been deliberately manipulated to strip away built-in safety guardrails and can be readily accessed or downloaded. With little more than a laptop and a few keystrokes, a radicalized individual could use these tools to plan an attack anywhere in the country. The problem is no longer hypothetical, and it is time for Congress to act.

As Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, I have made it my mission to keep the Department of Homeland Security ahead of the threats of tomorrow. I authored the Generative AI Terrorism Risk Assessment Act to require an annual assessment of how terrorist groups are exploiting GenAI to recruit and radicalize lone wolf actors on the Internet. We owe it to the dedicated professionals at DHS to equip them with every tool and resource necessary to protect Americans and safeguard the homeland.

We must also be clear-eyed about the fact that the threats to our country are not only foreign. Homegrown extremism and lone actors inspired by content generated in seconds by AI tools are as much a part of our threat picture now as any foreign terrorist organization. Protecting the homeland today means protecting Americans from threats that can originate across the globe and right here at home.

None of this diminishes what happened twenty-five years ago; it only deepens our resolve. Nearly three thousand innocent Americans died on September 11, 2001, and thousands more service members and their families paid the price in the years that followed. We owe it to every one of them, and to the first responders who ran toward danger that day, never to let 9/11 fade into a distant chapter of history that younger Americans only read about in textbooks.

That is why, regardless of party, we should be united in this cause. Political violence and terrorism have no place in this country, no matter who commits them or why. Remembering 9/11 should not divide Americans along political lines. It should instead remind us of who we are when we stand together. We are a nation that does not bend to fear, and that will always defend its people, its freedoms, and its way of life.

Twenty-five years later, I still remember exactly where I was standing that morning. My hope is that twenty-five years from now, America will still remember too.