US and UK Spy Chiefs Enlist Generative AI in Intelligence Operations

As part of a declaration about how their two agencies collaborate, CIA Director Bill Burns and MI6 Chief Richard Moore outlined how their agencies are using AI to combat modern threats.

The duo disclosed that both organizations are actively leveraging generative AI to enhance intelligence activities, especially to process huge amounts of intel, in a joint op-ed published by the Financial Times.

“We are now using AI, including generative AI, to enable and improve intelligence activities—from summarization to ideation to helping identify key information in a sea of data,” the intelligence chiefs wrote.

Burns and Moore also highlighted the use of AI in safeguarding their own operations. They said they are training AI systems to “red team” their activities, ensuring they can maintain necessary secrecy.

The spy chiefs painted a picture of a world where technology is reshaping the geopolitical space—and pointed to the war in Ukraine as a prime example where satellite imagery, drone technology, cyber warfare, and information operations are converging at an unprecedented scale.

“This conflict has demonstrated that technology, deployed alongside extraordinary bravery and traditional weaponry, can alter the course of war,” Burns and Moore stated.

Beyond Ukraine, the CIA and MI6 are actively collaborating to disrupt Russia’s disinformation campaigns and what they describe as a “reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe.”

Russia’s use of generative AI is evolving rapidly. Last week, the DOJ seized over 30 sites maintained by Russian actors as part of a misinformation campaign using AI to target U.S. citizens ahead of the 2024 elections.

Meanwhile, according to a recent report by the South China Morning Post, Russia is coordinating with China on the military use of AI, including discussions on lethal autonomous weapons systems and other military applications.

China’s approach to generative AI presents its own set of challenges. According to February 2024 testimony to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission by the RAND think tank, China is expected to incorporate generative AI into cyber-enabled influence operations, too. RAND alleges that the Chinese military, particularly the People’s Liberation Army, aims to use AI for social media manipulation and election interference.

Both the MI6 and the CIA identify the rising Asian superpower as “the principal intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the 21st century.” The intelligence chiefs stressed that their agencies aren’t going it alone in this tech arms race, and are forging partnerships with innovative companies across the U.S., U.K., and globally to maintain their technological edge.

While this joint revelation from Burns and Moore is important for transparency, it’s worth noting that intelligence agencies have been exploring AI applications for some time.

Back in July, Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s director of Artificial Intelligence Innovation, spoke at an Amazon Web Services Summit about the agency’s use of generative AI for content triage and analyst assistance. “We were captured by the generative AI zeitgeist just like the entire world was a couple of years back,” he said, according to NextGov.

“We’ve also had a lot of success with generative AI, and we have leveraged generative AI to help us classify and triage open-source events to help us search and discover and do levels of natural language query on that data,” Raman added.

Different AI companies like OpenAI and Palantir have also been striking deals with different government agencies to provide AI services that increase their capabilities.

This is a substantial trend. According to a report by the Washington-based Brookings Institution, federal agencies increased their potential awards to private tech contracts by almost 1,200%, from $355 million to $4.6 billion in the period studied.