FBI Director Kash Patel claims AI has prevented school shootings, but evidence remains contested

FBI Director Kash Patel Says AI Has Stopped Numerous Violent Attacks Against America. We'd Love to See a Single Whiff of Evidence

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech In a recent interview on Sean Hannity's YouTube podcast, FBI head Kash Patel lauded AI for helping stop multiple violent attacks on innocent people. "AI was never used at the FBI till we got there, literally crazy," Patel said in his characteristically hopped up affect. "I'm using it everywhere." Specifically, Patel -- who's been accused of severe issues related to alcohol consumption -- alleges that using AI the FBI has been able to foil numerous mass shootings at schools throughout the US. "We stopped a school massacre in North Carolina because we got a tip from our private-sector partners who are building out AI infrastructure," he bragged. As with everything coming out of the Trump administration, we need to take this statement with a Mar-a-Lago-sized grain of salt. While it remains to be seen whether AI has really helped the FBI thwart mass casualty events, there's extremely compelling evidence that the exact opposite is also true. For starters, research has shown that AI chatbots are actually twice as likely to encourage humans to commit violent acts than step in and stop them. One Stanford study found that AI chatbots only discourage violence 16.7 percent of the time, while the same chatbots actively supported violent thoughts in an alarming 33.3 percent of cases. In the real world, this is manifesting into a key pattern of violence. After the second shooting at Florida State University -- the 2025 one, not the 2014 one -- in which two were killed and seven injured, it was found that the perpetrator had not only confided in ChatGPT about his plans to commit a mass shooting, but used the chatbot to organize the attack. The mass shooter in Tumbler Ridge, Canada conducted conversations with ChatGPT so disturbing that they were automatically flagged by the company's internal moderation systems, spurring leadership at the company to debate whether to inform law enforcement; they ultimately didn't, and the attack killed seven and injured dozens more. Meanwhile in South Korea, police investigators allege a 21-year-old serial killer used ChatGPT to help plan at least two murders. A Connecticut man with a history of violent mental health episodes was likewise alleged to have killed his mother before taking his own life after long-running conversations with ChatGPT resulted in a disturbing break from reality. One wrongful death suit in Florida alleges Google's chatbot, Gemini, encouraged a man to kill others in order to procure a "robot body" for his AI lover; failing that, he killed himself. Elsewhere, AI chatbots have helped users overdose on drugs, plan bombing campaigns, and even engineer bioterror attacks while maximizing casualties. At the end of the day, the evidence speaks for itself. Not only are AI chatbots not demonstrably preventing violence, they're actively facilitating it. Unlike any technology before it, these systems provide users contemplating bloodshed with encouragement, tactical advice, and emotional reinforcements. If those in power refuse to acknowledge the reality of AI's harms, the public will be left defenseless against a technology made to encourage our worst impulses.

Kash Patel Touts AI Overhaul of FBI Crime-Fighting Operations - Decrypt

Civil liberties advocates continue to warn that AI-powered surveillance and facial recognition tools can introduce bias and expand government monitoring powers. Artificial intelligence is becoming a larger part of federal law enforcement operations, and FBI Director Kash Patel says the agency is using the technology to help locate missing children, identify suspects, and respond to threats more quickly. In an opinion piece published Monday on the Fox News website, Patel wrote that the FBI launched a broad modernization effort after he and then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino took leadership roles at the bureau. "When I was first sworn in as ninth director of the FBI, one of my top priorities was to modernize the bureau with new, cutting-edge technology that would allow us to better serve and protect the American people," Patel wrote. According to Patel, when he arrived, "the FBI was running on archaic patchwork systems without AI, effectively putting a 2025 car battery into a vehicle from 1985." He said it was like a Commodore 64 when the agency needed to be a supercomputer. Patel said the FBI created an AI working group, appointed a chief AI officer, launched an AI review board, and teamed with private-sector companies to modernize internal systems and investigative tools. "Artificial intelligence is a huge part of that overhaul. When then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino and I arrived here at headquarters, AI had almost zero role at the FBI," Patel wrote. "That had to change, so we got to work." Now, Patel said the FBI uses AI tools at its National Threat Operations Center to transcribe incoming calls, summarize threats, compare tips against existing cases, and rank leads by severity -- a process he claimed recently helped agents stop a planned mass shooting at a North Carolina preschool. "Last year alone, the FBI identified and located 6,300 missing kids, a 30% increase, and arrested 2,000 abusers, a 20% increase -- largely thanks to these improvements," he wrote. "In a recent FBI Richmond case, the FBI's Child Exploitation Operational Unit used facial recognition tools to save 8- and 12-year-old children from a would-be abuser, who will now spend 50 years in prison," he added, further noting that the FBI used AI to process more than 75 terabytes of material collected after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. Patel's article comes as federal agencies have increasingly adopted AI tools for intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, immigration operations, document review, and surveillance. In March, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that it had signed deals with Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, and SpaceX to incorporate their AI technology. The FBI's AI expansion has drawn criticism from civil liberties groups and privacy advocates, who warn that facial recognition systems and automated threat assessment tools can introduce bias, generate false matches, and expand government surveillance powers. "Now that we have AI, that idea of limitation is completely out the window," Naomi Brockwell, founder of the privacy advocacy group Ludlow Institute, told Decrypt. "AI can sort people, rank them, adjust credit scores, and use all of this data to paint intimate profiles and preemptively conduct law enforcement." In April, Reps. Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert introduced a bill that would require warrants for federal agencies to access Americans' digital data, using AI-assisted surveillance tools. Despite concerns about AI-driven surveillance or the technology replacing human agents, Patel argued the FBI cannot afford to fall behind in adopting cutting-edge tools. "We are not replacing humans; we're supplementing them, sharpening their focus and expediting the pace of our investigations," he said. "Collecting data to sit in storage is like keeping Babe Ruth on the bench permanently."

FBI used AI to prevent school shootings, Director Kash Patel claims

The FBI has begun using artificial intelligence (AI) under Director Kash Patel and has used it to stop multiple school shootings, Patel claimed on a podcast on Tuesday. Speaking to American conservative television presenter Sean Hannity on the Hang Out with Sean Hannity podcast, Patel said that AI had never been used by the bureau before because the former FBI was focused on "weaponization, not modernization." "What's the point of collecting terabytes of data if you can't sift through it?" he criticized. Under his leadership, he claimed, the FBI had integrated AI into its National Threat Operations Center and the Criminal Justice Information Services database to, among other tasks, sift through the thousands of tips it receives every week. "If we had just humans look at it, we would never sift through them all," he argued. "We stopped a school massacre in North Carolina because we got a tip and we were able to triage it with artificial intelligence." Patel also claimed that the FBI had received a tip from private-sector partners building their AI infrastructure, and had used that tip to prevent a school shooting in New York. "I've got every major tech company embedded into the FBI," he said, "And the ability for artificial intelligence to be in our counterterrorism program so we can get instantaneous results." FBI using AI for arrest warrants, vehicle recognition, language identification Among the functions Patel believes AI can assist with is its ability to "pop fingerprints immediately and get fugitives and arrest warrants out." The official FBI website lists additional uses for AI, including "vehicle recognition, triage of voice samples for language identification, and generation of text from speech samples." The site also claims that a trained investigator or analyst is responsible for assessing the output of the integrated AI systems, and that "a human being is ultimately accountable for the actions taken, not an AI." "The FBI's policies and procedures for the collection, analysis, and use of data for its investigations are designed to meet the highest standards of privacy, civil liberties, ethics, and adherence to the US Constitution," it declares.