CIA to develop ChatGPT-style AI tool to aid intelligence analysis

The Central Intelligence Agency is developing its own generative artificial intelligence tool to help with intelligence analysis, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

According to the media outlet, the CIA plans to create its own ChatGPT-style program that will be able to sort through large amounts of public, open-source data quickly. The agency aims to compete with China in the race to develop advanced AI technology.

The tool will be developed by the CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division and available to the CIA and 17 other U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The AI-powered technology will not be available to lawmakers or the general public, the outlet reported.

The director of Open-Source Enterprise, Randy Nixon, told Bloomberg the tool will be helpful for analyzing vast amounts of intelligence information.

“We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,” Nixon stated. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

He explained that the tool will allow users to view source information and that the technology may even include a chatbot feature.

“Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions of the machines to give you answers, also sourced,” Nixon continued. “Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost.”

“The scale of how much we collect and what we collect on has grown astronomically over the last 80-plus years, so much so that this could be daunting and at times unusable for our consumers,” Nixon added.

The agency has not revealed what AI model it will base its tool on or how it plans to ensure sensitive information is not leaked online, Bloomberg reported.

According to the outlet, the CIA’s plan to collect information from open sources has previously raised privacy concerns from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which noted that agencies can purchase data from unregulated commercial marketplaces.

An ODNI 2022 report found that the data purchased by intelligence agencies “can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons.” For example, location data from cell phones is classified as open-source information available for purchase by government agencies.

The CIA’s director for AI, Lakshmi Raman, stated that the agency’s AI-powered chatbot will assist with research and writing, Politico reported.

“We need the people who can do this kind of work,” Raman said. “And the truth is the demand far exceeds the supply.”

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