The CIA reportedly has an AI chatbot in the works

Tech companies aren’t the only ones developing AI chatbots, and intelligence services are also ready to join the race. According to Engadget (via Bloomberg), the CIA is preparing to jump on the AI bandwagon by developing an exclusive AI chatbot.

While you might think a chatbot is useless for the CIA, the agency has much to do with it. Randy Nixon, the CIA’s director of Open Source Enterprise, said the agents and spies would use this chatbot to look up information, ask follow-up questions, and summarize daunting masses of data. The CIA chatbot relies on public data for training and provides agents with sources to help them validate data.

“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 in an interview with Bloomberg. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

CIA will develop its own AI chatbot for agents and spies

Nixon further added the US intelligence community will “soon” have access to the tool. This tool won’t be available to lawmakers and the public as expected. Nixon also said such tools allow the agency to grow its collection with no limitations and concern about the costs. “Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions of the machines to give you answers, also sourced,” he said.

It remains to be seen which AI tools serve as the foundation of the CIA chatbot. However, it’s more likely to be based on ChatGPT as it’s the most advanced AI chatbot available today. The CIA’s director of Open Source Enterprise insists on AI capabilities for summarizing a big chunk of data and pushing the right information to agents.

Unsurprisingly, the CIA chatbot has been raising concerns about privacy since the beginning. Nixon says their AI tool will follow the US privacy laws. However, using public data for training and the possibility of any data leak are the biggest concerns about the tool. Some US intelligence agencies are already caught buying data, including phone locations.