The Power and Pitfalls of AI for US Intelligence

Artificial intelligence extends the reach of national security threats that can target individuals and whole societies. The intelligence community is grappling with the fits and starts of the revolution brought on by artificial intelligence.

The US intelligence community has launched initiatives to grapple with artificial intelligence's implications and ethical uses, but these approaches and other practical applications of such technologies have been largely fragmented.

As experts sound the alarm that the US is not prepared to defend itself against its strategic rival, China, Congress has called for the IC to produce a plan for integration of such technologies into workflows to create an "ai digital ecosystems"

Artificial intelligence is a group of technologies that are used to solve problems or perform tasks that mimic humans. Artificial intelligence includes technologies that can theoretically survive autonomously in novel situations, but its more common application is machine learning that uses big data, statistical models, and correlation.

Artificial intelligence that can mimic humanlike sentience is impractical for most IC applications, while machine learning is addressing fundamental challenges created by the volume and speed of information that analysts are tasked with evaluating.

There are patterns in the mass of signals intelligence collected by the National Security Agency. The CIA's Directorate of Digital Innovation is responsible for advancement of digital and cyber technologies in human and open-source collection, as well as its covert action and all- source analysis, which integrates all kinds of raw intelligence collected by the US. An analyst looks at the significance of the intelligence when it's taken together and memorializes it into a report.

Open source is important to the adoption of artificial intelligence. The scale and relevance of public data can't be replicated in a classified environment.

Capitalizing on open source and artificial intelligence will allow the IC to use other finite collection capabilities more efficiently. There are other disciplines that can be used to get the secrets that are hidden. Better global coverage of unforeseen or non-priority collection targets that could quickly evolve into threats could be provided by the use of artificial intelligence.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to extract data from images taken daily by commercial and government satellites. In order to increase the productivity of its analysts, the Defense Intelligence Agency trains its programs to recognize nuclear, radar, environmental, material, chemical, and biological measurements.