Spy Vs. AI

U.S. Diplomacy


Since its founding in 1922, Foreign Affairs has been the leading online forum for major conversation of American diplomacy and international affairs. The magazine has actually featured contributions from numerous prominent global affairs experts.


More Resources


- Feedback

- Institutional Subscriptions

- Gift a Membership

- About Us

- Events

- Issue Archive

- Advertise

- Audio Content

- Account Management

- FAQs


Spy vs. AI


ANNE NEUBERGER is Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technology on the U.S. National Security Council. From 2009 to 2021, she served in senior functional roles in intelligence and cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, including as its first Chief Risk Officer.


- More by Anne Neuberger


Spy vs. AI


How Artificial Intelligence Will Remake Espionage


Anne Neuberger


-.

Copy Link Copied.
Article link: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/spy-vs-aihttps://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/spy-vs-ai.
Copy



Gift Link Copied.
This is a subscriber-only function. Subscribe now or Check in.



Create Citation Copied.
Chicago MLA APSA APA.
Chicago Cite not available at the minute.
MLA Cite not available at the minute.
APSA Cite not available at the moment.
APA Cite not available at the minute



Download PDF.
This is a subscriber-only feature. Subscribe now or Check in.



Request Reprint.
Request reprint authorizations here.






In the early 1950s, the United States dealt with a crucial intelligence challenge in its growing competition with the Soviet Union. Outdated German reconnaissance images from The second world war might no longer supply sufficient intelligence about Soviet military capabilities, and existing U.S. security capabilities were no longer able to permeate the Soviet Union's closed airspace. This deficiency spurred an audacious moonshot initiative: the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. In just a couple of years, U-2 objectives were providing crucial intelligence, recording pictures of Soviet rocket installations in Cuba and bringing near-real-time insights from behind the Iron Curtain to the Oval Office.


Today, the United States stands at a similar point. Competition between Washington and its competitors over the future of the international order is heightening, and now, much as in the early 1950s, the United States need to benefit from its world-class private sector and adequate capability for innovation to outcompete its foes. The U.S. intelligence neighborhood must harness the nation's sources of strength to provide insights to policymakers at the speed of today's world. The integration of artificial intelligence, especially through big language designs, provides groundbreaking chances to improve intelligence operations and analysis, allowing the delivery of faster and more relevant assistance to decisionmakers. This technological transformation includes substantial disadvantages, nevertheless, specifically as foes make use of similar improvements to reveal and counter U.S. intelligence operations. With an AI race underway, the United States must challenge itself to be first-first to gain from AI, first to protect itself from opponents who might use the technology for ill, and first to utilize AI in line with the laws and worths of a democracy.


For the U.S. national security community, fulfilling the pledge and managing the danger of AI will need deep technological and cultural changes and a desire to alter the way firms work. The U.S. intelligence and military neighborhoods can harness the potential of AI while reducing its fundamental risks, ensuring that the United States maintains its one-upmanship in a rapidly evolving worldwide landscape. Even as it does so, the United States should transparently convey to the American public, and to populations and partners around the world, how the country means to fairly and safely use AI, in compliance with its laws and values.


MORE, BETTER, FASTER


AI's potential to transform the intelligence neighborhood lies in its capability to procedure and evaluate huge amounts of information at extraordinary speeds. It can be challenging to evaluate large amounts of collected data to produce time-sensitive cautions. U.S. intelligence services might take advantage of AI systems' pattern recognition abilities to recognize and alert human analysts to possible threats, such as rocket launches or military movements, or important global advancements that analysts know senior U.S. decisionmakers are interested in. This ability would ensure that critical warnings are timely, actionable, and relevant, permitting more reliable responses to both quickly emerging dangers and emerging policy opportunities. Multimodal designs, which incorporate text, images, wiki.fablabbcn.org and audio, boost this analysis. For instance, utilizing AI to cross-reference satellite images with signals intelligence could offer a detailed view of military movements, making it possible for quicker and more accurate danger evaluations and possibly new means of delivering details to policymakers.


Intelligence analysts can likewise unload repetitive and lengthy jobs to devices to focus on the most satisfying work: producing original and deeper analysis, increasing the intelligence community's total insights and productivity. An excellent example of this is foreign language translation. U.S. intelligence firms invested early in AI-powered capabilities, and the bet has paid off. The capabilities of language designs have actually grown progressively sophisticated and accurate-OpenAI's recently released o1 and o3 models showed considerable progress in precision and thinking ability-and can be used to much more quickly equate and summarize text, audio, and video files.


Although challenges remain, future systems trained on higher amounts of non-English information might be capable of discerning subtle differences between dialects and comprehending the meaning and cultural context of slang or Internet memes. By counting on these tools, the intelligence community might concentrate on training a cadre of highly specialized linguists, who can be difficult to find, frequently battle to make it through the clearance procedure, and take a long time to train. And naturally, by making more foreign language materials available throughout the best agencies, U.S. intelligence services would be able to faster triage the mountain of foreign intelligence they receive to select the needles in the haystack that truly matter.


The value of such speed to policymakers can not be ignored. Models can swiftly sift through intelligence information sets, open-source details, and traditional human intelligence and produce draft summaries or initial analytical reports that analysts can then confirm and refine, making sure the end products are both detailed and precise. Analysts might coordinate with an advanced AI assistant to overcome analytical problems, test concepts, and brainstorm in a collective fashion, enhancing each version of their analyses and delivering finished intelligence more quickly.


Consider Israel's experience in January 2018, when its intelligence service, the Mossad, discreetly broke into a secret Iranian facility and took about 20 percent of the archives that detailed Iran's nuclear activities in between 1999 and 2003. According to Israeli officials, the Mossad gathered some 55,000 pages of documents and an additional 55,000 files stored on CDs, consisting of images and videos-nearly all in Farsi. Once the archive was obtained, senior authorities positioned tremendous pressure on intelligence professionals to produce detailed evaluations of its material and whether it indicated a continuous effort to build an Iranian bomb. But it took these experts numerous months-and numerous hours of labor-to equate each page, examine it by hand for pertinent material, and include that details into evaluations. With today's AI capabilities, the very first two actions in that process could have been accomplished within days, possibly even hours, enabling experts to comprehend and contextualize the intelligence quickly.


Among the most fascinating applications is the method AI could transform how intelligence is consumed by policymakers, allowing them to communicate straight with intelligence reports through ChatGPT-like platforms. Such abilities would allow users to ask particular questions and get summed up, pertinent details from thousands of reports with source citations, assisting them make informed choices quickly.


BRAVE NEW WORLD


Although AI uses numerous benefits, it also poses considerable brand-new threats, specifically as enemies develop comparable technologies. China's improvements in AI, particularly in computer system vision and security, threaten U.S. intelligence operations. Because the nation is ruled by an authoritarian program, it lacks privacy constraints and civil liberty protections. That deficit allows large-scale data collection practices that have yielded data sets of tremendous size. Government-sanctioned AI models are trained on large amounts of personal and behavioral information that can then be used for different purposes, such as security and social control. The presence of Chinese business, such as Huawei, in telecommunications systems and software around the globe might provide China with ready access to bulk information, sciencewiki.science especially bulk images that can be utilized to train facial recognition models, a particular concern in countries with big U.S. military bases. The U.S. nationwide security neighborhood should consider how Chinese models developed on such extensive data sets can offer China a tactical advantage.


And it is not just China. The proliferation of "open source" AI designs, such as Meta's Llama and those created by the French business Mistral AI and the Chinese company DeepSeek, is putting effective AI abilities into the hands of users around the world at fairly budget-friendly costs. Much of these users are benign, but some are not-including authoritarian programs, cyber-hackers, and criminal gangs. These malign actors are using large language designs to rapidly generate and spread out false and destructive content or to carry out cyberattacks. As witnessed with other intelligence-related technologies, such as signals obstruct capabilities and unmanned drones, China, Iran, and Russia will have every incentive to share a few of their AI developments with client states and subnational groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Wagner paramilitary company, therefore increasing the danger to the United States and its allies.


The U.S. military and intelligence neighborhood's AI designs will end up being appealing targets for enemies. As they grow more effective and main to U.S. nationwide security decision-making, intelligence AIs will end up being crucial national properties that must be safeguarded against adversaries looking for to jeopardize or control them. The intelligence neighborhood must purchase establishing protected AI designs and in establishing standards for "red teaming" and constant assessment to safeguard against potential threats. These groups can use AI to imitate attacks, uncovering possible weaknesses and developing techniques to mitigate them. Proactive procedures, consisting of collaboration with allies on and investment in counter-AI technologies, will be vital.


THE NEW NORMAL


These challenges can not be wanted away. Waiting too long for AI technologies to completely mature carries its own risks; U.S. intelligence capabilities will fall behind those of China, Russia, and other powers that are going full steam ahead in developing AI. To make sure that intelligence-whether time-sensitive cautions or longer-term strategic insight-continues to be an advantage for the United States and its allies, the country's intelligence neighborhood requires to adapt and innovate. The intelligence services should quickly master the use of AI technologies and make AI a foundational aspect in their work. This is the only sure way to guarantee that future U.S. presidents get the very best possible intelligence support, remain ahead of their adversaries, and secure the United States' sensitive capabilities and operations. Implementing these changes will require a cultural shift within the intelligence neighborhood. Today, intelligence experts mainly develop products from raw intelligence and information, with some support from existing AI designs for voice and imagery analysis. Moving forward, intelligence officials need to check out including a hybrid method, in line with existing laws, utilizing AI models trained on unclassified commercially available data and refined with classified details. This amalgam of innovation and standard intelligence gathering might result in an AI entity offering instructions to imagery, signals, open source, and measurement systems on the basis of an incorporated view of regular and anomalous activity, automated images analysis, and automatic voice translation.


To accelerate the shift, intelligence leaders need to promote the benefits of AI integration, highlighting the improved abilities and performance it uses. The cadre of recently designated chief AI officers has actually been established in U.S. intelligence and defense to act as leads within their firms for promoting AI development and removing barriers to the innovation's execution. Pilot jobs and early wins can construct momentum and self-confidence in AI's abilities, encouraging broader adoption. These officers can take advantage of the expertise of nationwide labs and other partners to test and refine AI designs, ensuring their effectiveness and photorum.eclat-mauve.fr security. To institutionalize modification, leaders need to produce other organizational incentives, including promotions and training opportunities, to reward inventive approaches and those staff members and units that demonstrate effective use of AI.


The White House has developed the policy needed for making use of AI in national security firms. President Joe Biden's 2023 executive order regarding safe, secure, and trustworthy AI detailed the assistance needed to fairly and safely use the technology, and National Security Memorandum 25, issued in October 2024, is the nation's foundational technique for harnessing the power and handling the dangers of AI to advance national security. Now, Congress will require to do its part. Appropriations are needed for departments and agencies to create the facilities needed for innovation and experimentation, conduct and scale pilot activities and evaluations, and continue to buy evaluation capabilities to make sure that the United States is building reliable and high-performing AI technologies.


Intelligence and military communities are devoted to keeping humans at the heart of AI-assisted decision-making and have developed the structures and tools to do so. Agencies will need standards for how their experts should use AI designs to make certain that intelligence items satisfy the intelligence community's standards for reliability. The federal government will likewise require to maintain clear guidance for managing the information of U.S. people when it pertains to the training and usage of large language models. It will be essential to balance using emerging innovations with safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of residents. This implies augmenting oversight systems, updating relevant structures to reflect the abilities and dangers of AI, and fostering a culture of AI advancement within the nationwide security apparatus that harnesses the capacity of the innovation while protecting the rights and liberties that are foundational to American society.


Unlike the 1950s, when U.S. intelligence raced to the leading edge of overhead and satellite imagery by developing numerous of the essential innovations itself, the AI race will need that neighborhood to reimagine how it partners with private industry. The private sector, which is the main means through which the government can recognize AI progress at scale, is investing billions of dollars in AI-related research, data centers, and computing power. Given those companies' developments, intelligence firms ought to prioritize leveraging commercially available AI models and fine-tuning them with categorized information. This method makes it possible for the intelligence community to quickly broaden its capabilities without needing to begin from scratch, enabling it to remain competitive with enemies. A recent collaboration between NASA and IBM to develop the world's biggest geospatial structure model-and the subsequent release of the model to the AI community as an open-source project-is an exemplary demonstration of how this kind of public-private partnership can work in practice.


As the nationwide security community incorporates AI into its work, it needs to ensure the security and durability of its designs. Establishing standards to release generative AI securely is essential for maintaining the integrity of AI-driven intelligence operations. This is a core focus of the National Security Agency's new AI Security Center and its partnership with the Department of Commerce's AI Safety Institute.


As the United States faces growing rivalry to shape the future of the international order, it is immediate that its intelligence firms and military take advantage of the country's development and leadership in AI, focusing particularly on large language designs, to supply faster and more appropriate details to policymakers. Only then will they gain the speed, breadth, and depth of insight required to navigate a more complicated, competitive, and content-rich world.