CIA builds its own artificial intelligence tool in rivalry with China

US intelligence agencies are getting their own ChatGPT-style tool to sift through an avalanche of public information for clues.

The Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to roll out a feature akin to OpenAI Inc.’s now-famous program that will use artificial intelligence to give analysts better access to open-source intelligence, according to agency officials. The CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division plans to provide intelligence agencies with its AI tool soon, Bloomberg reports.

“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,” Randy Nixon, director of the division, said in an interview. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

It’s part of a broader government campaign to harness the power of AI and compete with China, which is seeking to become the global leader in the field by 2030. That US push dovetails with the intelligence community’s struggle to process the vast amounts of data that’s now publicly available, amid criticism that it’s been slow to exploit that source.

The CIA’s AI tool will allow users to see the original source of the information that they’re viewing, Nixon said. He said that a chat feature is a logical part of getting intelligence distributed quicker.

“Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions of the machines to give you answers, also sourced,” said Nixon, whose division oversees intelligence drawn from publicly and commercially available sources. “Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost.”

The CIA didn’t say what model it will use to underpin its new tool or how it will protect information from seeping onto the open Internet, something large enterprises are still grappling to ensure by establishing guardrails. The agency has emphasized its expanding partnerships with the tech sector in recent years.

The AI tool will be available across the 18-agency US intelligence community, which includes the CIA, National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and agencies run by branches of the military. It won’t be available to policy makers or the public. Nixon said the agency closely follows US privacy laws.

The Defense Department, which oversees spy agencies such as the NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency, established a task force in August to investigate potential uses and problems associated with large-language models. Gilbert Herrera, director of research at the NSA, said in an interview in May that the US intelligence community needs “to find a way to take benefit of these large models without violating privacy.”

The intelligence community’s broader goal of using open-source information has also run into privacy considerations.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has flagged concerns about intelligence agencies turning to largely unregulated commercial marketplaces to purchase troves of data about people, including location information gathered from mobile phones. The intelligence community classifies such information as open-source information, even if it is available only for purchase by governments.

“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 that the AI tool would let analysts move to a process “where the machines are pushing you the right information, one where the machine can auto-summarize, group things together.”