US eyes introducing AI into intelligence activities

US intelligence agencies are grappling with a daunting new challenge: Making artificial intelligence safe for America’s spies, Report informs referring to Bloomberg.

An arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is tapping companies and colleges to help harness rapidly developing AI technology that could provide an edge against global competitors like China. The challenge is ensuring it doesn’t open a backdoor into the nation’s top secrets or generate fake data.

“The intelligence community wants to avail itself of the large-language models out there, but there are a lot of unknowns,” said Tim McKinnon, a data scientist who manages one of the ODNI’s projects, known as Bengal. “The end goal is being able to work with a model with trust.”

The focus on reliability and security is part of a broader US military and intelligence campaign to harness the power of AI and compete with China, which is seeking to become the global leader in the field by 2030. It’s also helping drive a surge in AI-related hiring in the Washington area as the government and its contractors embrace the emerging technology.

The most pressing concerns center on large-language models, which use massive data sets to power tools such as OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT to provide detailed responses to user prompts and questions.

“The intelligence community views AI with healthy skepticism and a range of enthusiasm,” said Emily Harding, director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, citing as an example the ability for analysts to process large amounts of information but doubts about the reliability of current models.

“It’s a tool in its earliest stages of usefulness,” she said.

The Central Intelligence Agency’s chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani, sees AI potentially boosting productivity by digesting vast volumes of content and finding patterns that would be difficult or impossible for humans to discern. He also sees it as way to compete with China’s numerical advantage in intelligence staffing.

US spy agencies have already begun to experiment with AI programs of their own. The Central Intelligence Agency was preparing to roll out a feature akin to ChatGPT that will give analysts better access to open-source intelligence, Bloomberg News reported in September.