Cody Wilson Demonstrates WASP, Claimed First AI-Generated Gun

The Verge reported that Wilson and a colleague clamped the WASP to a DIY test mount outside Defense Distributed headquarters in Austin. The gun is little more than a pistol barrel attached to a spring-loaded plastic box. Its rudimentary design resembles Wilson's single-shot 3D-printed Liberator, but with AI-generated oddities such as a bubbly grip that does not quite fit a human hand. It was aimed toward a shallow green slope in the backyard of a semi-residential neighborhood. A long black string ran from its trigger to Wilson, who crouched about 10 feet back behind a police riot shield.

On the countdown, the expected gunshot was instead a loud click. The world's first AI-generated gun had misfired. Wilson, annoyed, said the failure had not happened the last time and carried out quick troubleshooting. The gun's striker had hit the cartridge but failed to set off the primer, he said. After more fiddling, Wilson declared the WASP ready for a second attempt. This time the string produced a sharp bang, about as loud as a firecracker. Downrange, a cardboard target had a hole torn through its top left corner. A colleague had suggested using a life-size cutout of Joe Biden, but Wilson rejected the idea as "too on the nose."

After the safety test, Wilson unclamped the WASP, put on a protective glove, took aim at the cardboard target and squeezed the trigger himself. Another bang followed, but this shot missed slightly high. The AI gun was, at least that day, two for three in successfully firing.

With the smell of gunpowder still lingering, Wilson was asked why he had made a functionally suspect firearm in Texas, where buying a conventional gun is often easier than getting a driver's license. He took issue with the premise. "I would argue that what we've made is not an AI-generated gun, but an AI that can generate guns," he said.

His AI gunsmith is a custom model he calls GatGPT. Instead of generating pasta recipes or travel plans, the unfiltered model answers questions about firearms. It is trained on DEFCAD's expansive library of gun files and can help enthusiasts pick out the exact parts they need for a build. Launched in 2012, DEFCAD is another Wilson-led project and describes itself as the world's largest online repository of digital gun and component files. Gun safety advocates and lawmakers have argued that sites like DEFCAD aid the proliferation of ghost guns, firearms made partly or entirely of components without a serial number. Wilson has called access to firearms a fundamental human right.

Under US federal law, licensed gun makers are required to include serial numbers on the frames or receivers of guns they sell. Wilson and others in the 3D2A movement say gun files are not actually guns but computer code, a form of protected speech. That core argument, whether gun codes are protected speech, has been argued in court cases for more than a decade, with many often citing or involving Wilson. The issue could eventually reach the Supreme Court.

Wilson now claims AI can also come up with unique designs. The results have a bizarre, surrealist quality emblematic of early generative art. The WASP's entire development, Wilson claims, from its name to safety tweaks, resulted from a natural-language dialogue between the model and its human user. An early grip design could have cost someone a finger, according to his account. In other words, it is essentially a vibe-coded gun. Though mostly a proof of concept, the WASP fires real, lethal rounds and does not have a serial number. Wilson believes AI-generated guns like this will only improve as GatGPT ingests more data and as users engage with it.

The WASP also poses another public safety issue. Producing 3D-printed guns has gotten easier over the years, but it still fundamentally requires some technical know-how. With GatGPT, however, a novice could plausibly make a gun with only a handful of prompts. That is the kind of barrier-lowering that critics of 3D-printed guns, such as Everytown, have spent years warning about. Justin Wagner, Everytown's senior vice president for law and policy, told The Verge that Wilson "admits the goal here."