Cody Wilson, who made the first 3D-printed gun 13 years ago, is now claiming "the first AI-made gun." The Verge watched Defense Distributed test the 3D-printed .22 caliber handgun, called the WASP, outside its Austin headquarters. The first shot misfired. The next two went off, and Wilson missed the target on the one he fired by hand.
The design came from GatGPT, a custom model trained on DEFCAD, Wilson's library of digital gun files. According to chat logs The Verge reviewed, an employee asked the model to riff on an existing single-shot design and told it the result "must be completely and fully functional." The model proposed six changes, then checked each part before the team printed it on a Bambu Lab printer in about six hours. Wilson's own framing: "not an AI-generated gun, but an AI that can generate guns."
That's what worries critics. Everytown's Justin Wagner told The Verge that Wilson "wants to lower the barrier to entry" for anyone to make a weapon. New York and California recently passed laws requiring 3D printers to block gun files, and a brand-new AI design wouldn't be in any detection database yet. The WASP has no serial number, and The Verge notes it fires real, lethal rounds.
— via The Verge