TechDesignPolicyThe first vibe-coded gun is hereCody Wilson says his AI model can generate new gun designs for 3D printing. We saw him fire the first one.by Mack DeGeurinOct 16, 2026, 12:30 PM UTCShareGiftThe WASP. | Image: Defense DistributedSince gun-rights activist and alt-right-friendly agitator Cody Wilson made the first 3D-printed firearm 13 years ago, he’s helped usher in a chaotic era of untraceable ghost guns. Now he’s claiming another first: “the first AI-made gun.” It’s called the WASP.I stood about 20 feet away as Wilson and his sidekick clamped the WASP to a DIY test mount outside Defense Distributed 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 box.
Its rudimentary design bears a resemblance to Wilson’s single-shot 3D-printed “Liberator,” albeit with some quintessentially AI-generated oddities, like a wacky, bubbly grip that doesn’t 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 sat crouched about 10 feet back behind a police riot shield.“Three. Two.
One.” I braced for a thunderous crack, but instead heard only a loud click. The world’s first AI-generated gun had misfired.“This didn’t happen last time,” Wilson, annoyed, reassured me as he carried out some quick troubleshooting. The gun’s striker had hit the cartridge, he said, but failed to set off the primer. I quietly took another step back.
After some more fiddling, Wilson declared the WASP ready for a second chance. This time, pulling the string produced a sharp bang, about as loud as a firecracker. Downrange, a cardboard target had a hole ripped through its top left corner. His colleague had suggested using a life-size cutout of Joe Biden, but Wilson shot that down as “too on the nose.”RelatedNew York governor to 3D-printed gun leader: ‘tell Cody I will get ahead of him’The cat-and-mouse game over 3D-printed guns has begunAre you ready for what it takes to stop ghost guns?The safety test completed, Wilson then unclamped the WASP, slipped on a protective glove, took aim at the cardboard target, and squeezed the trigger himself.
Another bang. This time, a miss, slightly high. The AI gun, today at least, was two for three in terms of shots successfully fired.A hand-drawn target in the backyard of the Defense Distributed headquarters in Austin, Texas. Image: The VergeWith the smell of gunpowder still lingering, I asked Wilson the obvious question: Why make this functionally suspect firearm in the first place?
We’re in Texas, where buying a conventional gun is often easier than getting a driver’s license. He paused, taking 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.”His supposed AI gunsmith is a custom model he calls GatGPT. But instead of generating pasta recipes or travel plans, this unfiltered model answers questions about firearms. It’s 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 (another Wilson-led project) is the world’s largest online repository of digital gun and component files. Gun safety advocates and lawmakers have argued sites like DEFCAD aid the proliferation of “ghost guns,” firearms made partly or entirely of components without a serial number. Wilson, meanwhile, has called access to firearms “a fundamental human right.”“I would argue that what we’ve made is not an AI-generated gun, but an AI that can generate guns.”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 what’s referred to as the 3D2A movement say gun files aren’t actually guns, they are computer code, a form of protected speech.
That core argument, whether or not gun codes are protected speech, has been argued in court cases for over a decade, with many often citing or involving Wilson. It’s possible the issue will wind up before the Supreme Court.Now, Wilson claims, AI can also come up with its own unique designs. The results have a bizarre, surrealist quality emblematic of early generative art to the tune of Will Smith slurping spaghetti.The WASP’s entire development, Wilson claims, from its name to safety tweaks (an early grip design could have cost someone a finger), resulted from a natural-language dialogue between the model and its human user. In other words, it’s essentially a vibe-coded gun.
Though mostly a proof of concept, the WASP nonetheless fires real, lethal rounds and doesn’t 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.But the WASP also poses another pressing public safety issue. Producing 3D-printed guns has gotten easier over the years, but it still fundamentally requires some technical know-how. Now, however, a novice armed with GatGPT could plausibly make a gun with only a handful of prompts.
That’s exactly the kind of barrier-lowering that critics of 3D-printed guns, like Everytown, have spent years warning about.“[Wilson] admits the goal here,” Everytown senior vice president for law and policy Justin Wagner told The Verge. “He wants to lower the barrier to entry so anyone, regardless of their background check status or legal eligibility [can] own a gun. He wants anyone to be able to design and manufacture weapons, and that’s dangerous.”Everytown has played a prominent role in advocating for a pair of recently passed laws in New York and California that will require 3D printer manufacturers to install firearm-blocking software that can detect guns or gun parts and stop them before they are ever printed. (Experts have questioned how and if these methods would actually work.)Wilson didn’t specifically cite evading detection as a reason for building an AI gun maker, but the development comes on the heels of his recent efforts to complicate firearm-blocking technology that New York and California will require in future 3D printers. In August, Wilson began rolling out a tool called Hochulization (a jab at New York Gov. Kathy Hochul) that he says subtly alters a file’s underlying hash, which functions as a kind of digital fingerprint.
By late September, Wilson claimed to The Verge that users had already “Hochulized” files more than 26,000 times, with some users applying the treatment more than once. It’s one of the many ways Wilson has planted a flag in the evolving battle over how to regulate 3D-printed guns.“He wants anyone to be able to design and manufacture weapons, and that’s dangerous.”The core idea behind that “self-defense measure,” as Wilson calls it, is to stymie a purely hash-based gun detection system by rendering it unable to keep up with constantly changing hashes. A new AI-generated gun design also wouldn’t immediately be recognized in a gun detection database, since it didn’t exist yet. More sophisticated gun detection software goes beyond simple hashes and uses AI to try to predict whether a file is likely a gun or gun component before it prints.
It’s unclear whether this type of software, which is still being developed, would reliably detect a sufficiently strange-looking AI-generated gun design.“Individuals who intentionally aim to thwart safety regulations put themselves and New York communities at risk, which is why Gov. Hochul remains committed to combating emerging threats and the production of ghost guns and illegally manufactured guns, and strengthening regulations that keep New Yorkers safe,” Hochul spokesperson Jess D’Amelia told The Verge.Defense Distributed’s AI didn’t just log on one day and suddenly decide to build a gun. It started wit
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