- Australia’s Home Affairs Minister warns AI is transforming terrorism threats and responses
- Extremist groups use AI to create multilingual propaganda and spread disinformation rapidly
- Young people radicalised quickly through gaming platforms, with AI bots aiding communication
Australia's Home Affairs and Immigration Minister Tony Burke has issued one of his most detailed public warnings yet on the changing face of terrorism, revealing that artificial intelligence is transforming both the threat and the response, in an exclusive interview with NDTV following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's July visit to Australia.
Burke said the traditional architecture of terrorism- organised cells, clear ideological lines, identifiable networks- is being upended. "Their powers, their capacity is about to be supercharged by artificial intelligence," he said, describing how extremist groups can now generate propaganda "quickly in multiple languages" and spread convincing disinformation "that is not true but looks real."
More alarming, Burke said, is a new domestic caseload unlike anything authorities have dealt with before: young, often male, radicalised at speed and increasingly through unexpected channels. "We have people now as young as 12 on our caseload," he revealed, describing a radicalisation pipeline running through gaming platforms rather than chat rooms or physical networks.
Users "run the game on one platform" while communicating with a stranger through headphones on another, building trust through shared in-game loyalty -- trust Burke said is deeper and more durable than the bonds formed in old-style online chat rooms. He added a chilling twist: "The person you're talking to increasingly with AI will have the capacity to be a bot."
The result, Burke said, is a form of "mixed ideology, fast radicalisation" that defies old categories. He cited cases on Australia's caseload combining ISIS-inspired beliefs with Nazism -- ideologies he noted "should not be capable of existing inside the same mind" but increasingly do.
Pressed on concrete cooperation with India following the Bondi Beach attack in Australia and the Pahalgam attack in India, both cited as evidence of terrorism's transnational, increasingly lone-wolf and online nature, Burke was candid about the limits of what he could disclose. "There's elements of this that I'm not able to talk about… when we talk to our friends we're also being listened to by our enemies," he said.
He did confirm one concrete step-- a new joint centre bringing together the Australian Federal Police and domestic intelligence agency ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) specifically to combat online radicalisation. Crucially, Burke said the fight will not be one-sided in the tech race.
"Part of what we'll be using is artificial intelligence as well," he said, describing tools already being developed to interfere with extremist activity online — capabilities he said are "best shared with partners who are trusted partners with strong relationships," a clear signal of deepening India-Australia cooperation on emerging tech-driven threats.
On China, Burke was more guarded but pointed to Australia's practice of joining international partners in publicly attributing cyberattacks to hostile states, and stressed the Quad's role in defending the "sovereignty" and democratic character of Indo-Pacific nations -- with the Pacific islands, he said, now a key arena where Australia wants to be the region's "security partner of choice."
Burke's remarks mark one of the clearest official acknowledgements that the India-Australia security relationship is shifting from conventional counter-terrorism cooperation toward a joint response to AI-enabled radicalisation — a threat both nations' technologically advanced populations are uniquely placed to counter together.
