Understanding leaders around the world is one of the CIA’s most important jobs. Teams of analysts comb intelligence gathered by spies and publicly available information to create profiles of leaders that can predict behaviors.
An AI-powered chatbot now helps to do the job.
Over the past two years, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed a tool that allows analysts to talk to virtual versions of foreign presidents and prime ministers, who respond.
“It’s a fantastic example of an application that we were able to rapidly deploy and go into production in a cheaper and faster way,” said Nand Mulchandani, the CIA’s chief technology officer.
The chatbot is part of the spy agency’s effort to improve the tools available to CIA analysts and its field officers, and to better understand adversaries’ technical advances. The point of the effort is to make it easier for companies to work with the more secretive agency.
William J. Burns, the CIA director for the past four years, has prioritized improving the agency’s technology and understanding how it is used. Incoming Trump administration officials say they plan to build on these initiatives, not destroy them.
At his confirmation hearing, John Ratcliffe, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, said the agency had “struggled to keep pace” as technological innovation shifted from the public to the private sector. But Mr Ratcliffe spoke in positive terms of Mr Burns’ efforts and said he would expand them because “the nation that wins the race in today’s emerging technologies will dominate tomorrow’s world”.
The CIA has long used digital tools, spying equipment and even artificial intelligence. But with the development of new forms of AI, including large language models that power chatbots, the agency has increased its investment.
Better use of AI, Mr Burns said, is crucial to US competitiveness with China. And better AI models have helped agency analysts “digest the avalanche of open source information out there,” he said.
The new tools have also helped analysts process information obtained clandestinely, Mr. Burns said. New technologies developed by the agency are helping spies navigate the cities of authoritarian countries where governments use AI-powered cameras to conduct constant surveillance on their own populations and foreign spies.
“We’re making good strides,” Mr Burns said. “But I would be the first to argue that we need to go faster and further.”
Shortly after Mr. Burns began his job, he tapped Dawn Meyerriecks, who led the agency’s science and technology directorate from 2014 to 2021, to review the CIA’s efforts.
The review pushed for a culture change. Ms Meyerriecks said the CIA had long believed it could do everything on its own. The agency had to make an adjustment and embrace the idea that some of the technology it needed was developed by the commercial sector and designed to keep information secure.
“There was really no reason why the CIA couldn’t adopt and adapt commercial technology,” Ms. Meyeriecks.
Under Mr. Burns’ leadership, the agency created a technology-focused mission center to better understand the technology being used by China and other adversaries. And hired Mr. Mulchandani, who helped found a number of successful startups before joining the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence center, as the agency’s first chief technology officer.
His mandate over the past two and a half years was to make it easier for private companies that had developed new technologies to sell those applications and tools to the CIA.
The conundrums facing anyone who wants to do business with the agency are twofold. First, his needs are classified. How can you sell anything to America’s spies if you don’t know what they are doing or what they need? Second, there is bureaucracy.
In his workspace, Mr. Mulchandani unfurled a 6-foot-tall board outlining the layers of approvals and other steps to get a contract with the agency.
Each of the rules was put in place for a reason – for example, to address a problem with a contract, or something else that goes wrong on a project. But the cumulative result is a set of rules that have made it difficult for companies to work with the government.
The CIA is reviewing and trying to trim those rules. But it’s also trying to be more open with tech companies about what it needs.
“The more we share about how we use technology, how we procure technology, what we’re going to do with it, it’s going to make companies want to work with us and want to partner with us more,” he said. Juliane Gallina, who directs. directorate of digital innovation for the CIA
Ms. Gallina says the agency has taken the step of declassifying some material to “give some exposure” to the problem it is trying to overcome so that technology firms can compete for agency contracts.
The CIA has long recognized the technology’s problem. A quarter century ago the agency helped found In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital fund, to help foster companies that could provide new technologies to the intelligence community. Her successes include helping to expand firms like Palantir, a secretive data analytics company, and the company that became Google Earth.
But the CIA also wants more established firms, or firms with other venture capital backing, to pitch their ideas to the agency. That’s where the shedding of bureaucratic clutter comes in, along with efforts to change at least parts of the spy agency’s culture.
Many offices in the CIA are cubicles or have sets of desks for assistants. When Mr. Mulchandani began, he was given a space on the same floor as the top leadership of the CIA, but he was not satisfied.
Mr. Mulchandani recalled that the agency officer who gave him the tour asked him, “What’s wrong?” He replied: “Everything.”
He was turned off by the small offices, lack of natural light and closet-like rooms to view the most classified materials. He ordered a renovation. The old offices were replaced by various spaces with mobile tables for meetings and exchange of ideas. The goal was to create a space that echoed Silicon Valley workplaces—and signaled to visiting entrepreneurs that the agency was ready to change.
“The space will promote culture, the culture of speaking,” said Mr. Mulchandani. “A slice of Silicon Valley on the seventh floor.”
Whether the cultural changes will last is an open question. And fixing the rules and cutting red tape is the work of years, not months. But Mr. Mulchandani and the agency’s outgoing leadership are hopeful.
“No one will deny the fact that technology is literally the single most destructive force in the world today,” Mr. Mulchandani said. “And our government and our work will be completely dependent on technology and will be disrupted by technology. I can’t speak to the leadership coming in, but there’s no doubt in my mind that this is the super leader on their roster.”
