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The Soufan Center

medium confidence · updated 2026-07-26

Independent non-profit research centre on global security and violent extremism. Its reporting on threats against AI companies and personnel is a primary source for the emerging pattern of AI-directed political violence, describing a rise in 'direct threats' against individuals, policymakers, and corporations involved with AI.

An independent non-profit research centre working on global security, terrorism, and violent extremism.

Relevance to AI policy

The centre's threat reporting supplies one of the few systematic evidence bases for violence directed at AI development itself. Its work, cited in The AI Backlash Could Get Very Ugly — Lila Shroff (The Atlantic, May 13 2026), "describes a rise in 'direct threats' against individuals, policymakers, and corporations involved with AI, with the most common online threats involving 'physical' harm" (AI-Driven Political Violence).

Its analytical contribution is to apply an extremism-research frame to a target set that literature had not previously covered. That matters because the causal account differs from most AI-harm analysis: the violence is directed at AI development because of its social and economic effects — labour displacement, data-centre externalities, perceived governance failure — rather than being violence carried out using AI tools.

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