Using a series of prompts six days before he died by suicide outside the main entrance of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Matthew Livelsberger, a highly decorated US Army Green Beret from Colorado, consulted with an artificial intelligence on the best ways to turn a rented Cybertruck into a four-ton vehicle-borne explosive. According to documents obtained exclusively by WIRED, US intelligence analysts have been issuing warnings about this precise scenario over the past year--and among their concerns are that AI tools could be used by racially or ideologically motivated extremists to target critical infrastructure, in particular the power grid. "We knew that AI was going to change the game at some point or another in, really, all of our lives," Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told reporters on Tuesday. Copies of his exchanges with OpenAI's ChatGPT show that Livelsberger, 37, pursued information on how to amass as much explosive material as he legally could while en route to Las Vegas, as well as how best to set it off using the Desert Eagle gun discovered in the Cybertruck following his death. Screenshots shared by McMahill's office reveal Livelsberger prompting ChatGPT for information on Tannerite, a reactive compound typically used for target practice.

The FBI confirmed the email sent to the Shawn Ryan Show podcast was indeed from the Tesla Cybertruck subject Matthew Livelsberger, while Las Vegas police say Livelsberger used ChatGPT to plan the explosion. The FBI on Tuesday said an email that appeared to have been sent from the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion subject Matthew Livelsberger to prominent podcaster Shawn Ryan was indeed confirmed to have come from Livelsberger. At a press conference, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Las Vegas Spencer Evans clarified that law enforcement has not verified the actual content of Livelsberger's email, just that he sent it. "We have confirmed the document that he sent to the podcast. We know that he was the one that sent that document. That's correct," Evans told reporters.