Understanding world leaders is one of the CIA’s most important tasks. Teams of analysts review intelligence collected by spies and publicly available information to create executive profiles that can predict behavior.
An AI-powered chatbot now helps do this job.
Over the past two years, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed a tool that allows analysts to speak to virtual versions of foreign presidents and prime ministers, who respond.
“This is a fantastic example of an application that we were able to rapidly deploy and put into production more quickly and less expensively,” said Nand Mulchandani, CIA chief technology officer.
The chatbot is part of the spy agency’s desire to improve the tools available to CIA analysts and its agents in the field, and to better understand the technical advances of adversaries. The main goal of this effort is to make it easier for companies to work with the most secretive agency.
William J. Burns, CIA director for four years, has prioritized improving the agency’s technology and understanding how it is used. New 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 was “struggling to keep pace” as technological innovation shifted from the public sector to the private sector. But Mr. Ratcliffe spoke positively of Mr. Burns’ efforts and said he would expand them because “the nation that wins the race for today’s emerging technologies will dominate tomorrow’s world.”
The CIA has a long history of using digital tools, spy gadgets and even artificial intelligence. But with the development of new forms of AI, including the large language models that power chatbots, the agency has stepped up its investments.
Mr. Burns said better use of AI is crucial to U.S. competition with China. And better AI models have helped the agency’s analysts “digest the avalanche of open source information,” he said.
The new tools also helped analysts process surreptitiously acquired information, Burns said. New technologies developed by the agency help spies navigate cities in authoritarian countries where governments use AI-powered cameras to constantly monitor their populations and foreign spies.
“We are making considerable progress,” Mr. Burns said. “But I would be the first to say we need to go faster and further.”
Shortly after Mr. Burns took office, he selected 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 itself. The agency had to adapt and accept the idea that some of the technology it needed had been developed by the commercial sector and was designed to keep information secure.
“There was really no reason why the CIA couldn’t adopt and adapt commercial technology,” Ms. Meyerriecks said.
Under Mr. Burns’ leadership, the agency created a technology-focused mission center to better understand the technology used by China and other adversaries. And it hired Mr. Mulchandani, who helped found a series of successful start-ups before joining the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence center, as the agency’s first chief technology officer.
Its mandate over the past two and a half years has been to make it easier for private companies that have developed new technologies to sell those applications and tools to the CIA.
The conundrums facing anyone wishing to do business with the agency are twofold. First, its needs are classified. How can you sell anything to American spies if you don’t know what they do or what they need? Second, there is bureaucracy.
In his workspace, Mr. Mulchandani unfurled a six-foot-long chart detailing the levels of approvals and other steps to securing a contract with the agency.
Each of the rules was put in place for a reason – for example, to resolve a problem with a contract or something wrong with a project. But the cumulative result is a set of regulations that make it difficult for businesses to work with government.
The CIA is reviewing and trying to prune these 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 buy it, what we’re going to do with it, the more companies will want to work with us and collaborate more with us,” said Juliane Gallina, who leads the group. director of digital innovation for the CIA
Gallina says the agency made the decision to declassify some documents to “reveal a little bit” about the problem it’s trying to solve, so tech companies can compete for agency contracts.
The CIA has long recognized the technological problem. A quarter of a century ago, the agency helped create In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital fund, to help promote companies that could bring new technologies to the intelligence community. His successes include helping to develop companies like Palantir, a secretive data analytics company, and the company that became Google Earth.
But the CIA also wants more established companies, or companies with other venture capital backing, to pitch their ideas to the agency. That’s where cutting bureaucratic clutter comes in, as well as efforts to change at least some parts of the spy agency’s culture.
Many CIA offices are warrens of cubicles or have clusters of desks for assistants. When Mr. Mulchandani started, he was given space on the same floor as the CIA’s top leaders, but he was not happy.
Mr. Mulchandani remembers the agency agent showing him around asking him: “What’s wrong? He replied: “Everything.”
He was put off by the small offices, lack of natural light, and closet-like rooms for viewing the most classified documents. He ordered a renovation. The old offices have been replaced by different spaces with mobile desks for meetings and the exchange of ideas. The goal was to create a space that resonated with Silicon Valley workplaces — and signal to visiting entrepreneurs that the agency was ready for change.
“Space will drive culture, a culture of speech,” Mr. Mulchandani said. “A slice of Silicon Valley on the seventh floor.”
Whether cultural changes will persist is an open question. And adjusting the rules and cutting red tape is the work of years, not months. But Mr. Mulchandani and the agency’s outgoing leaders remain hopeful.
“No one will deny the fact that technology is literally the most disruptive force in the world today,” Mulchandani said. “And the government and our own work are going to be completely dependent on technology and disrupted by technology. I can’t speak for the incoming leaders, but I have no doubt that this is at the top of their list.