Borrowed Fluency

Every safeguard between Boko Haram and a working answer from AI failed. What held them back was that the people who could work the models were somewhere else — and every one of those people left a payment trail.

A munzir in the Lake Chad basin had a bomb that would not go off. The wires ran in a way that seemed to be stopping detonation, and he could not put the question himself, because his rank did not permit him to work the AI model on his own. So he went to his qaid, the last rank in ISWAP authorised to use a large language model, and asked him to put the question to ChatGPT. The model answered. Its answers, the munzir said, "were not very clear." Then the qaid "contacted some people about how to put the question, and then it gave us useful information on how exactly to connect the wires, and it worked." Somebody outside Nigeria knew how to ask. "They call people in the network for this kind of help every day."

The models produced usable output the moment somebody phrased the question correctly, and the skill to phrase the hard ones was unevenly held (and partly imported — flown in, paid from abroad, or telephoned). Every safeguard between this group and a working answer failed. What stopped them going further was not a guardrail. It was simply that the people who knew how to ask were somewhere else, and had to be paid.

The full dossier follows that payment trail through the only field study that documents any of this, and into the statute that already makes buying ISWAP a subscription a federal crime nobody has charged.

The Jewish State — Mitzpe's eight-session live course on Israeli history from the Mandate to October 7, taught the way the brief reads. Cohort 1: eight Sundays from Oct 11. mitzpe.org/the-jewish-state