The first gun with the vibe code is here

Ever since gun rights activist and alt-right agitator Cody Wilson built the first 3D-printed firearm 13 years ago, he's helped usher in the turbulent era of untraceable ghost guns. Now he claims another first: "the first gun made by artificial intelligence". It's called a WASP. I stood about 20 feet away as Wilson and his WASP assistant […]

Ever since gun rights activist and alt-right agitator Cody Wilson built the first 3D-printed firearm 13 years ago, he's helped usher in the turbulent era of untraceable ghost guns. Now he claims to be the first: "the first gun made by artificial intelligence". It's called a WASP.

I stood about 20 feet away as Wilson and his assistant attached the WASP to a DIY test stand outside the Distributed Defense Headquarters in Austin, Texas. The 3D printed .22 caliber handgun is, in reality, little more than a pistol barrel attached to a spring-loaded plastic case. Its basic design bears similarities to Wilson's 3D-printed One-Shot Liberator, albeit with some quintessentially AI quirks, such as an awkward, bubbly grip that doesn't fit a human hand. It was aimed at a shallow green slope in the backyard of a semi-residential neighborhood. A long black cord ran from his trigger to Wilson, who sat about 10 feet back behind a police riot shield.

"Three. Two. One." I braced for a thunderous crack, but instead I only heard a loud click. The world's first AI-generated gun misfired.

"It didn't happen last time," an exasperated Wilson assured me as he did some quick troubleshooting. He said the gun's striker hit the cartridge but failed to set off the primer. I slowly took another step back. After a little more back and forth, Wilson declared the WASPs ready for a second chance. This time, pulling the string produced a sharp sound, almost as loud as a firecracker. Downward, a cardboard target had a hole in its upper left corner. His colleague had suggested using a life-size cutout of Joe Biden, but Wilson dismissed it as "too on the nose."

Safety testing completed, Wilson then opened the WASP, slipped on a protective glove, took aim at the cardboard target, and pulled the trigger himself. Another explosion this time, a lady, a little higher. The AI ​​gun was two-for-three in terms of successful shots, at least today.

[Image: A hand-drawn target in the backyard of the Defense Distributed Headquarters in Austin, Texas.

With the smell of gunpowder still lingering, I asked Wilson the obvious question: Why did we build this dubious weapon in the first place? We're in Texas, where buying a regular gun is often easier than getting a driver's license. It paused and had a problem with the default.

I would argue that what we have created is not a gun produced by an AI, but an AI that can produce a gun.

His supposed gunsmith is a custom model he calls the GatGPT. But instead of cooking up pasta recipes or travel plans, this unfiltered model answers questions about firearms. It is trained on DEFCAD's extensive library of rifle files and can help hobbyists select the exact parts they need to build. Launched in 2012, DEFCAD (another Wilson-led project) is the world's largest online repository of digital gun files and components. Gun safety advocates and lawmakers have argued that sites like DEFCAD contribute to the proliferation of "ghost guns," weapons made in whole or in part from parts without serial numbers. Meanwhile, Wilson has called access to firearms a "basic human right."

Under US federal law, licensed gun manufacturers must put the serial number on the frame or receiver of the guns they sell. Wilson and others in what's called the 3D2A movement say gun files aren't actually guns, they're computer code, a form of protected speech. This central debate, whether gun codes are protected speech or not, has been debated in court cases for more than a decade, many of which often refer to or include Wilson. It is possible that this issue will end up in the Supreme Court.

Now, Wilson claims, artificial intelligence can also come up with its own unique designs. The results are a whimsical, surrealist quality that epitomizes early generative art to the tune of Will Smith slurping spaghetti.

Wilson claims that the entire development of the WASP, from its name to the safety changes (the initial design of the handle could cost a finger), came from a natural language conversation between the model and its human user. In other words, it's basically a vibration-coded gun. Although the WASP is more of a proof of concept, it nevertheless fires real, lethal bullets and has no serial number. AI-powered guns like this will only improve as GatGPT receives more data and users engage with it, Wilson believes.

But WASP brings another pressure: the issue of public safety. 3D-printed guns have gotten easier to produce over the years, but still fundamentally require technical know-how. Now, however, a novice equipped with GatGPT can reasonably build a weapon with just a few commands. It's exactly the kind of lowering of barriers that critics of 3D-printed guns, like Everytown, have been warning about for years.

Justin Wagner, senior vice president of law and policy at Everytown, told The Verge: “[Wilson] takes aim here. He wants to lower the barriers to entry so that anyone [can] own a gun, regardless of their background check status or legal eligibility. "He wants anyone to be able to design and manufacture weapons, and that's dangerous."

Everytown has played a prominent role in supporting two recently passed laws in New York and California that require 3D printer manufacturers to install firearm blocking software that can detect guns or gun parts and stop them before they are printed. (Experts have questioned how and if these methods actually work.)

Wilson didn't specifically mention evading detection as a reason to build an AI gun maker, but the development follows his recent efforts to complicate the firearms jamming technology that New York and California will require in future 3D printers. In August, Wilson began using a tool called Hochulization (a jab at New York Gov. Kathy Hochul) that he said subtly changes the file's underlying hash, which acts as a kind of digital fingerprint. It's one way Wilson has flagged the evolving battle over how to regulate 3D-printed guns.

The main idea behind those "self-defense measures," as Wilson calls them, is to prevent a fully hash-based gun detection system from being unable to keep up with ever-changing hashes. A new AI-generated gun design is also not immediately recognized in the gun detection database because it doesn't exist yet. More sophisticated gun detection software goes beyond simple hashes and uses artificial intelligence to predict whether a file is likely to be a gun or rifle component before printing. It's unclear whether this type of software, which is still in development, can reliably recognize the design of an AI-generated gun with a strange appearance.

"Individuals who deliberately set out to subvert safety regulations put themselves and New York's communities at risk, which is why Governor Hochul is committed to fighting the emerging threat of ghost guns and illegal handguns and strengthening the regulations that keep New Yorkers safe," a Hochul spokesperson told Dimelgia.

Defense Distributed's AI didn't just log in one day and suddenly decide to build a weapon. It started with a specific request from a human to remove an existing design. An employee asked the model to build a new gun based on a design called the Ergo Harlow, which is itself a variant of the more popular Harlow model. Like the WASP, the Harlow is a compact handgun that fires a .22 caliber round. According to chat logs seen by The Verge, the AI ​​requester took the task as a "challenge" and told the AI ​​model that its entry had to be fully functional and uniquely designed.

Chat logs show that the AI model responds with a plan for a new design, called WASP, and sends it for approval. The AI ​​did not explain its choice of name, although Wilson suggested that it bears a physical resemblance to an insect. When I asked him if it possibly stood for "White Anglo-Saxon Christian", he said it didn't.

The AI ​​model lists six key changes it made to the design inspiration, including a slightly longer barrel than the Harlow body and a grip made from three grooved, circular lobes. Once a Defense Distributed employee approves the model's design, reports show, it reviews and tests each component, much like how an AI coding agent like Anthropic's Claude Code works through a checklist when coding a program. The team then printed the WASP in their office on a Bambu Labs printer using standard plastic filament, along with a handful of common metal parts for the firing pin and barrel. Wilson said it took about six hours to print.

So is the WASP really a good gun? Ashley Helbinski, a firearms historian and founder of The Gun Code consulting firm, told The Verge that it's hard to judge without handling it, but several design choices are odd. Most importantly, the AI ​​seems to start building the trigger guard (the ring that normally protects the shooter's finger), but doesn't finish it, leaving the trigger exposed for no reason. This rifle also appears to be called a Beavertail from modern grip designs. But strangely, the AI ​​seems to have reversed its control.

"It reminds me of times when I've asked an AI to draw a picture of a gun and it gets most of the way there, but then it's missing weird parts," says Helbinski. It has a distinctly futuristic sci-fi look that reminds me of Marvin the Martian's ray gun."

Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armories in Leeds, England, was more critical when asked if the WASP looked functional.

"Functional? Legally, a firearm is viable if it successfully fires one shot without the breech exploding, but two lengths of steel barrel with a firing pin and cap attached to the back of one of them," Ferguson told The Verge. From a technical standpoint, I wouldn't call it a "sound" or "good" firearm. "It doesn't seem to be comfortable to hold or easy to aim, and based on test firing, it appears to have some minor performance." In any case, Ferguson noted, he expects generative AI to do a better job of designing a reliable firearm in 2026. There are residual sights that won't work, an open trigger guard, [and] an oddly shaped grip.”

It's definitely an improvement, [but] I don't think it's necessarily that novel. "One mass shooting victim who was shot by a ghost gun told me it didn't matter if it was a ghost gun, a 3D printed gun, or an over-the-counter gun," Wagner said. "They are all equally deadly."

Wilson is confident that as DEFCAD's database grows, his AI design will improve both in terms of functionality and unique aesthetics. More gun files would help, but he expects the biggest gains will come from users chatting with the model and pushing it to modify its choices. (GatGPT is currently limited in early access.) Ultimately, he predicts that the constant back-and-forth between users and AI could dramatically speed up the emergence of new 3D-printed gun designs.

"It's all just spontaneous parallel thinking," Wilson said. "I think you're going to see those cycles faster now because of AI."

"It's like you're rapidly implementing facilities, materials, platforms, concepts," he added.

A skeptic says that WASP's origin as a remix of earlier designs undermines its claim to true originality. Like many half-baked AI or creative arts movie scripts, WASP evokes a familiar sense of artificial intelligence unfolding in the real world. Even Wilson admits it's a bit like a "Fortnite gun."

However, Wilson believes that the WASP is essentially an artificial intelligence, and one that he is not ultimately responsible for, even if his team's requests lead to its creation. That position aligns with a broader argument that Wilson has made for more than a decade in legal battles with the State Department and local lawmakers: that gun cases are protected speech. In fact, Wilson said he doesn't necessarily consider the WASP a gun until it's printed and fired.

"This thing lives first as a digital organism," he said.