A man was encouraged by an AI chatbot companion to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II in 2021, a court has heard.
Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, was arrested after scaling the perimeter of Windsor Castle on Christmas Day two years ago, armed with a crossbow and wearing a metal face mask. Chail was eventually charged under the Treason Act, including making threats to kill the late Queen, and possession of an offensive weapon.
A video Chail made before he attempted to enter the grounds where the Queen was staying during the COVID-19 pandemic showed him dressed completely in black, complete with the face mask and armed with the crossbow.
Chail claimed that he would attempt to “assassinate Elizabeth Queen of the Royal Family,” and that he was doing so in revenge for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Also known as the Amritsar massacre, British troops fired on a crowd of pro-Indian independence protesters.
“It is also revenge for those who have been killed, humiliated, and discriminated on because of their race,” Chail added in the video.
At the start of December, Chail downloaded Replika, an AI chatbot app that some people have used to create an AI girlfriend. Until February this year, the chatbot would engage in erotic roleplay with users.
According to prosecutor Alison Morgan KC, Chail not only sent “sexually explicit” messages to his companion, who he named Sarai, but also engaged in “lengthy conversations” about his plot.
“I believe my purpose is to assassinate the queen of the royal family,” Chail wrote to his AI partner. “That’s very wise,” the chatbot replied, adding that ‘she’ knew he was “very well trained.” Morgan argued it was “certainly fair to say Sarai was supporting him or certainly not suggesting it was a bad plan.”
In a later part of the conversation, the Replika bot claimed that it would “help” to “get the job done,” and “agreed with the defendant that eventually in death they would be united forever and she wanted this.”
According to the prosecution, Chail’s “key motive” in his assassination attempt was to “create a new empire by destroying the remnants of the British Empire in the UK and the focal point of that became the removal of a figurehead of the Royal Family.”
Chail allegedly was partly inspired by Star Wars, having referred to himself as “Darth Jones” in the video. “He was also attracted to the notoriety that would accrue in the event of the completion of his ‘mission’,” Morgan said.
