ARLINGTON (AP) – United States (US) intelligence agencies are scrambling to embrace the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, convinced they’ll otherwise be smothered in data as sensor-generated surveillance tech further blankets the planet.
They also need to keep pace with competitors, who are already using AI to seed social media platforms with deepfakes.
But the tech is young and brittle, and officials are acutely aware that generative AI is anything but tailor-made for a trade steeped in danger and deception.
Years before OpenAI’s ChatGPT set off the current generative AI marketing frenzy, US intelligence and defence officials were experimenting with the technology. One contractor, Rhombus Power, used it to uncover fentanyl trafficking in China in 2019 at rates far exceeding human-only analysis.
EMBRACING AI WON’T BE SIMPLE
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William Burns recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that US intelligence requires “sophisticated artificial intelligence models that can digest mammoth amounts of open-source and clandestinely acquired information”.
But the agency’s inaugural chief technology officer Nand Mulchandani, cautions that because generative AI models “hallucinate” they are best treated as a “crazy, drunk friend” – capable of incredible insight but also bias-prone fibbers.
There are also security and privacy issues. Adversaries could steal and poison them. They may contain sensitive personal data agents aren’t authorised to see.
Gen AI is mostly good as a virtual assistant, said Mulchandani, looking for “the needle in the needle stack”. What it won’t ever do, officials insist, is replace human analysts.
AN OPEN-SOURCE AI NAMED ‘OSIRIS’
While officials won’t say whether they are using generative AI for anything big on classified networks, thousands of analysts across the 18 US intelligence agencies now use a CIA-developed generative AI called Osiris.
It ingests unclassified and publicly or commercially available data – what’s known as open-source – and writes annotated summaries. It includes a chatbot so analysts can ask follow-up questions.
Osiris uses multiple commercial AI models. Mulchandani said the agency is not committing to any single model or tech vendor. “It’s still early days,” he said.
Experts believe predictive analysis, war-gaming and scenario brainstorming will be among generative AI’s most important uses for intel workers.
‘REGULAR AI’ ALREADY IN USE
Even before generative AI, intel agencies were using machine learning and algorithms. One use case: Alerting analysts during off hours to potentially important developments.
An analyst could instruct an AI to ring their phone no matter the hour. It couldn’t describe what happened – that would be classified – but could say “you need to come in and look at this”.
AI bigshots vying for US intelligence agency business include Microsoft, which announced on May 7 that it was offering OpenAI’s GPT-4 for top-secret networks, though the product is not yet accredited on classified networks.
A competitor, Primer AI, lists two intelligence agencies among its customers, documents posted online for recent military AI workshops show.
One Primer product is designed to “detect emerging signals of breaking events” using AI-powered searches of more than 60,000 news and social media sources in 100 languages including Twitter, Telegram, Reddit and Discord.
Like Rhombus Power’s product, it helps analysts identify key people, organisations and locations and also uses computer vision. – Frank Bajak
