The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is developing an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help it sort through the vast amount of public information available online, according to a report by Bloomberg. The tool is expected to be rolled out to other intelligence agencies in the near future.
Randy Nixon, director of the CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division, told the outlet that the ChatGPT-style tool will likely be used by all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency (NSA), FBI, and various military agencies to find clues through primary information sources.
“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,” Nixon said. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”
Nixon said once an agency gathers such information, the analyst could start chatting and asking questions of the machines to provide sourced answers.
“Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost,” he said.
China has pledged to become the global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, which has raised concerns over its use of AI in several surveillance systems to track civilians within the nation and worldwide.
FBI Director Christopher Wray accused China in July of stealing “more of our personal and corporate data than every nation big or small, combined,” warning that the Chinese government poses a “double” threat regarding AI, according to The Register.
China “has already spent years stealing both our innovation and massive troves of data that turns out to be perfect for training machine learning models,” Wray said. “And now they’re in a position to close the cycle, to use the fruits of their widespread hacking to power with AI even-more-powerful hacking efforts.”
