The CIA is planning to unleash an artificial intelligence tool to give analysts better access to sort through vast amounts of public information, according to a Bloomberg report.
Randy Nixon, director of the CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division, told the outlet that the ChatGPT-style tool will likely be used by all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency (NSA), FBI, and various military agencies to find clues through primary information sources.
“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 said. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”
Nixon said once an agency gathers such information, the analyst could start chatting and asking questions of the machines to provide sourced answers.
“Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost,” he said.
Mass gathering of information from U.S. agencies comes as China has pledged to become the global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, which has raised concerns over its use of AI in several surveillance systems to track civilians within the nation and worldwide.
FBI Director Christopher Wray accused China in July of stealing “more of our personal and corporate data than every nation big or small, combined,” warning that the Chinese government poses a “double” threat regarding AI, according to The Register.
China “has already spent years stealing both our innovation and massive troves of data that turns out to be perfect for training machine learning models,” Wray said. “And now they’re in a position to close the cycle, to use the fruits of their widespread hacking to power with AI even-more-powerful hacking efforts.”
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NSA’s Jason Wang, technical director for the Computer and Analytic Sciences Research Group, said in 2021 that AI would play a central role in the Intelligence Community’s efforts to secure and defend U.S. networks.
“I think the next frontier for us is probably in the cybersecurity space,” Wang said. “There’s a lot of opportunity … to bring machines to this very low latency, highly dynamic problem in ways that really are not human-time kinds of responses.”
“[Cybersecurity] is a space where we’ve gotten [AI] efforts underway that I think we’d love to mature along with our partners,” he said.
Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that NSA Research Director Gil Herrera said the intelligence community needs to “find a way to take benefit of these large models without violating privacy.”
The CIA drafted Nixon earlier this year as the new Open Source Enterprise director to “speed up the agency’s development in open source intelligence just as the field is causing increasing concern and sparking rivalry in Washington,” according to Intelligence Online.
Nixon told Bloomberg the scale of how much the U.S. collects has grown over the last 80 years to a level that can sometimes be “daunting” and unusable for consumers.
He added that the AI tool would allow analysts move to a process “where the machines are pushing you the right information, one where the machine can auto-summarize, group things together.”