Yes, the CIA Is Building an AI Chatbot

By Pedro Solimano

The I in AI is now making its way into U.S. intelligence agencies.

The CIA announced it has begun creating its own AI chatbot much like the wildly popular ChatGPT. Nameless for now, the tool will be trained on publicly available data and aims to help U.S. spies to quickly verify information.

Bloomberg reported that the CIA has teamed up with other intelligence agencies to build the program. And according to Randy Nixon, the CIA’s director of Open Source Enterprise, it wil be ready “soon.”

During the interview, Nixon expanded on his views of the current state of technological affairs. “We have gone from newspapers and television, to big data and it just keeps on going,” he said. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

Tapping into the widely acknowledged data collection programs the U.S. has in place around the world, Nixon explained that the chatbot will allow officers to analyze large swathes of data. “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 said. He added: “Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost.”

But it's unclear just how limitless the CIA's capabilities will be.

Several government agencies—CIA included—have been caught overstepping their legal boundaries in regards to the amount and type information they collect on citizens. Nixon tried to assuage concerns, claiming the new tool will follow U.S. privacy laws. He didn’t provide much information, however, on how the CIA would protect itself against leaks or dubious information finding its way onto the tool.

The 18-agency intelligence community joins other U.S. branches that have begun exploring and expanding into AI.

In late August, the U.S. armed forces made headlines after reports surfaced that it was racing to deploy thousands of autonomous weapons along with AI air monitoring in the country’s capital. The military has also been training AI to handle State secrets and building AI fighter jets.

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