The Intelligence Community's AI Revolution
The feds are rapidly deploying artificial intelligence across spy agencies. What could go wrong?
The relentless march of artificial intelligence (AI) is not confined to Studio Ghibli memes and automated email responses. It is rapidly becoming a central pillar of national security strategy.
Within the labyrinthine corridors of the U.S. Intelligence Community (I.C.), which includes the military, CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among other organizations, an AI transformation is underway. It's driven by the promise of AI to collect previously indecipherable data, uncover hidden connections, and anticipate threats with unprecedented speed and scale. Yet, as the I.C. races toward an AI-infused future, profound questions about governance, ethics, privacy, and due process loom large. The journey toward AI adoption within the intelligence world is not merely a technological upgrade; it is a fundamental reshaping of how the state collects and acts upon information, with consequences only beginning to come into focus.
The path to integrating AI into the I.C. has been shaped by shifting politics and evolving technology. President Donald Trump's first administration issued an Artificial Intelligence Ethics Framework for the Intelligence Community. A "living guide" more than a rigid checklist, it aimed to steer personnel through the ethical design, procurement, and deployment of AI, emphasizing consistency with broader principles. It was an early acknowledgment that this powerful new tool required careful handling.
The Biden administration built upon this foundation, signaling a stronger push toward AI governance and implementation. Key initiatives included appointing chief AI officers across agencies, establishing the AI Safety Institute (AISI), cultivating AI talent within the federal government, and issuing executive orders on AI infrastructure. This era reflected a growing consensus on the strategic necessity of AI, coupled with efforts to institutionalize risk management and responsible development practices. In short, both Trump 1.0 and the Biden administration pursued a cautious, "safety" focused AI strategy—welcoming experimentation but only with elaborate ethical safeguards.
Times have changed. AI has progressed. Rivals have gained ground and international coordination on responsible AI development has waned. The second Trump administration has pivoted away from earlier AI norms. As I previously noted, it has adopted a more aggressive, "America First, America Only" approach. Vice President J.D. Vance has repeatedly emphasized deregulation at home and protectionism abroad, prioritizing U.S. dominance in chips, software, and rulemaking. This shift could dramatically accelerate AI deployment within the I.C. and may be seen as necessary for maintaining the U.S. intelligence advantage.
The Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Memorandum M-25-21 frames AI adoption as a mandate while potentially exempting the I.C. from procedural safeguards that apply elsewhere. It encourages interagency coordination—sharing data and insights to normalize AI use—and intra-agency flexibility, empowering lower-ranking staff to experiment with and deploy AI. The result is a decentralized, varied implementation with an overall direction to hasten and deepen the use of AI.
A glance at how the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team has deployed AI shows what may come. DOGE has empowered junior staff to deploy AI in novel, perhaps unsupervised, ways. They've used AI to probe massive federal datasets with sensitive information, identify patterns, spot alleged waste, and suggest reforms to substantive regulatory programs. Replicated in the I.C., this approach could bring major civil liberties and privacy risks.
Taken together, the policy signals suggest that by the end of 2025, the public can expect AI to be comprehensively adopted across virtually every facet of intelligence gathering and analysis. This isn't just about facial recognition or predictive maintenance, where the Department of Defense already leans on AI. It's a leap toward full reliance on AI in the intelligence cycle, with increased acceptance of its recommendations and minor human review.
Imagine AI drafting situational reports (SITREPs), instantly adopting the required format and tone while synthesizing critical information. Picture AI discovering previously invisible connections across disparate datasets—historical archives, signals intelligence, open-source material, and even previously unreadable formats now rendered accessible through AI. Consider the collection possibilities. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has already used machine learning on drones to track suspicious vehicles, previewing a future where AI significantly enhances intelligence across disciplines, fusing them into a real-time, AI-processed stream of intelligence. The entire intelligence cycle—from planning and tasking to collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination—is poised for AI-driven optimization, potentially shrinking timelines from days to hours.
This AI-first vision, backed by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence along with private sector actors such as Scale AI, requires not only technological integration but also the development and deployment of novel sensors and data-gathering methods. More importantly, it demands new standards for data collection and storage to create "fused" datasets tailored for algorithmic consumption. The goal isn't just more data—it's different data, structured to maximize AI utility on an unprecedented scale.
Where a human might process roughly 300 words per minute, advanced AI like Claude can read and analyze approximately 75,000 words in the same time. Initiatives like Project SABLE SPEAR demonstrate the capabilities and raise concerns about civil liberties and privacy.
The Defense Intelligence Agency greenlit that project in 2019, tasking a small AI startup with a simple yet vague task: to illuminate fentanyl distribution networks. Given minimal background and open source data, the company's AI systems produced astounding results: "100 percent more companies engaged in illicit activity, 400 percent more people so engaged," and "900 percent more illicit activities" than analog alternatives. Six years later, advances in AI, along with direct guidance from the administration to increase AI use, suggest that similar projects will soon become standard.
Such a shift in the intelligence cycle will demand new organizational structures and norms within the I.C. Concepts must evolve to mitigate automation bias—the tendency to over-rely on automated systems. "Augmenting cognition" rather than simply replacing analysts will be crucial to balancing AI's speed with human nuance. Regular audits must ensure that the reduced procedural barriers to AI use don't create unintended consequences. The drive for efficiency could erode longstanding checks and balances.
Herein lies the crux of the civil liberties and privacy challenge. The anticipated AI-driven I.C. will operate under a new data paradigm characterized by several alarming features.
- Vast amounts of information will be collected on more people. AI's hunger for data, paired with new sensors and fused datasets, will expand the scope of surveillance.
- Much of the collected information will be inferential. AI excels at finding patterns and generating predictions—not facts—about individuals and groups. These predictions may be inaccurate and hard to challenge.
- Audit and correction opportunities will dwindle. The complexity of sophisticated AI models makes it difficult to trace why a system reached a conclusion (the so-called "black box" problem), hindering efforts to identify errors or biases and complicating accountability.
- Data erasure becomes murky. If sensitive information is embedded in multiple datasets and models, how can individuals guarantee that information about them, especially inferential data generated by an algorithm, is truly deleted?
This confluence of factors demands a radical rethinking of oversight and redress mechanisms. How can individuals seek explanation or correction when dealing with opaque algorithmic decisions? What does accountability look like when harm arises from an AI system—is it the fault of the programmer, the agency, or the algorithm itself? Does the scale and nature of AI-driven intelligence gathering necessitate a "new due process," designed specifically for the algorithmic age? What avenues for appeal can meaningfully exist against the conclusions of a machine?
Navigating this complex terrain requires adhering to robust guiding principles. Data minimization—collecting only what is necessary—must be paramount, though it runs counter to the technology's inherent demand for data. Due process must be proportionate to the potential intrusions and built into systems from the outset, not added as an afterthought. Rigorous, regular, and independent audits are essential to uncovering bias and error. The use of purely inferential information, particularly for consequential decisions, should be strictly limited. Proven privacy-enhancing technologies and techniques must be employed. Finally, constant practice through realistic simulations, war games, and red teaming is necessary to understand the real-world implications and potential failure modes of these systems before they are deployed at scale.
While the potential benefits for national security—faster analysis, better prediction, optimized resource allocation—are significant, the risks to individual liberties and the potential for algorithmic error or bias are equally profound. As the I.C. adopts these powerful tools, the challenge lies in ensuring that the pursuit of security does not erode the very freedoms it aims to protect. Without robust ethical frameworks, transparent governance, meaningful oversight, and a commitment to principles like data minimization and proportionate due process, AI could usher in an era of unprecedented surveillance and diminished liberty, fundamentally altering the relationship between the citizen and the state. The decisions made today about how AI is governed within the hidden world of intelligence will shape the contours of freedom for decades to come.
