GitLab

U.S. Foreign Policy
Since its starting in 1922, Foreign Affairs has been the leading online forum for severe conversation of American foreign policy and international affairs. The magazine has featured contributions from numerous prominent international affairs specialists.

More Resources

- Feedback
- Institutional Subscriptions
- Gift a Subscription
- 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](https://youtubegratis.com). Copy


Gift Link Copied. This is a subscriber-only feature. Subscribe now or Sign in.


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


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


Request Reprint. Request reprint approvals here.




In the early 1950s, the United States faced a vital intelligence difficulty in its burgeoning competition with the Soviet Union. Outdated German reconnaissance photos from World War II might no longer provide sufficient intelligence about Soviet military capabilities, and existing U.S. monitoring abilities were no longer able to permeate the Soviet Union's closed airspace. This shortage spurred an audacious moonshot effort: the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. In just a couple of years, U-2 missions were providing crucial intelligence, catching pictures of Soviet missile setups 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 in between Washington and its rivals over the future of the international order is intensifying, and now, much as in the early 1950s, the United States must take benefit of its first-rate private sector and adequate capability for development to outcompete its enemies. The U.S. intelligence community must harness the nation's sources of strength to deliver insights to policymakers at the speed these days's world. The combination of expert system, especially through big language designs, forum.batman.gainedge.org provides groundbreaking chances to enhance intelligence operations and analysis, allowing the shipment of faster and more relevant assistance to decisionmakers. This technological revolution features significant disadvantages, however, especially as enemies exploit comparable developments to uncover and counter U.S. intelligence operations. With an AI race underway, the United States should challenge itself to be first-first to gain from AI, initially to safeguard itself from enemies who may utilize the technology for ill, and first to use AI in line with the laws and worths of a democracy.

For the U.S. nationwide security neighborhood, fulfilling the promise and managing the hazard of AI will require deep technological and cultural modifications and a determination to alter the method agencies work. The U.S. intelligence and military neighborhoods can harness the potential of AI while mitigating its fundamental risks, guaranteeing that the United States maintains its competitive edge in a quickly evolving global landscape. Even as it does so, the United States should transparently communicate to the American public, coastalplainplants.org and to populations and partners around the globe, how the country means to fairly and securely use AI, in compliance with its laws and worths.

MORE, BETTER, FASTER

AI's potential to revolutionize the intelligence community depends on its capability to process and analyze large amounts of data at extraordinary speeds. It can be challenging to analyze big quantities of collected information to produce time-sensitive warnings. U.S. intelligence services could take advantage of AI systems' pattern acknowledgment abilities to identify and alert human experts to potential hazards, such as missile launches or military motions, or important global advancements that analysts understand senior U.S. decisionmakers have an interest in. This capability would guarantee that critical cautions are prompt, actionable, and relevant, permitting more effective responses to both quickly emerging hazards and emerging policy chances. Multimodal designs, kenpoguy.com which integrate text, images, and audio, improve this analysis. For instance, utilizing AI to cross-reference satellite images with signals intelligence might supply a detailed view of military motions, making it possible for faster and more accurate danger assessments and potentially new methods of delivering details to policymakers.

Intelligence analysts can likewise unload repetitive and time-consuming tasks to devices to concentrate on the most satisfying work: generating initial and much deeper analysis, increasing the intelligence neighborhood's total insights and performance. An excellent example of this is foreign language translation. U.S. intelligence agencies invested early in AI-powered abilities, and the bet has actually paid off. The capabilities of language models have actually grown increasingly sophisticated and accurate-OpenAI's recently released o1 and o3 models demonstrated substantial progress in accuracy and reasoning ability-and can be utilized to much more quickly equate and sum up text, audio, and video files.

Although obstacles remain, future systems trained on greater quantities of non-English data could be efficient in critical subtle distinctions in between dialects and comprehending the significance and cultural context of slang or Internet memes. By relying on these tools, the intelligence neighborhood might concentrate on training a cadre of highly specialized linguists, who can be difficult to discover, frequently struggle to get through the clearance procedure, and take a long period of time to train. And obviously, by making more foreign language materials available across the right firms, U.S. intelligence services would have the ability to more rapidly triage the mountain of foreign intelligence they get to select the needles in the haystack that truly matter.

The worth of such speed to policymakers can not be undervalued. Models can promptly sort through intelligence information sets, open-source details, and traditional human intelligence and produce draft summaries or initial analytical reports that experts can then validate and fine-tune, ensuring the final products are both detailed and accurate. Analysts could partner with an innovative AI assistant to resolve analytical issues, test concepts, and brainstorm in a collective style, enhancing each model of their analyses and delivering completed intelligence more quickly.

Consider in January 2018, when its intelligence service, the Mossad, covertly 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 authorities, the Mossad collected some 55,000 pages of files and a more 55,000 files kept on CDs, including pictures and videos-nearly all in Farsi. Once the archive was obtained, senior authorities placed immense pressure on intelligence professionals to produce detailed evaluations of its material and whether it pointed to an ongoing effort to build an Iranian bomb. But it took these experts a number of months-and hundreds of hours of labor-to translate each page, review it by hand for relevant content, and include that details into assessments. With today's AI abilities, the very first two actions in that procedure could have been accomplished within days, maybe even hours, enabling experts to comprehend and contextualize the intelligence quickly.

One of the most intriguing applications is the way AI could transform how intelligence is consumed by policymakers, allowing them to interact straight with intelligence reports through ChatGPT-like platforms. Such abilities would allow users to ask specific concerns and receive summed up, appropriate details from thousands of reports with source citations, assisting them make informed choices quickly.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Although AI provides numerous benefits, it likewise presents considerable new risks, especially as adversaries develop comparable technologies. China's advancements in AI, especially in computer system vision and security, threaten U.S. intelligence operations. Because the country is ruled by an authoritarian regime, it does not have personal privacy constraints and civil liberty defenses. That deficit makes it possible for large-scale data collection practices that have yielded data sets of tremendous size. Government-sanctioned AI designs are trained on huge amounts of individual and behavioral information that can then be used for various functions, such as surveillance and social control. The presence of Chinese business, such as Huawei, in telecommunications systems and software around the world might provide China with ready access to bulk information, notably bulk images that can be used to train facial acknowledgment models, a particular issue in countries with large U.S. military bases. The U.S. nationwide security neighborhood need to think about how Chinese models developed on such substantial information sets can give China a tactical benefit.

And it is not just China. The expansion of "open source" AI models, such as Meta's Llama and those developed by the French business Mistral AI and the Chinese company DeepSeek, is putting powerful AI abilities into the hands of users throughout the globe at fairly affordable expenses. Many of these users are benign, however some are not-including authoritarian programs, cyber-hackers, and criminal gangs. These malign actors are using big language models to quickly produce and spread out incorrect and destructive content or to carry out cyberattacks. As witnessed with other intelligence-related technologies, such as signals intercept capabilities and unmanned drones, China, Iran, and Russia will have every reward to share a few of their AI breakthroughs with customer states and subnational groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Wagner paramilitary company, thus increasing the hazard to the United States and its allies.

The U.S. military and intelligence neighborhood's AI models will end up being appealing targets for foes. As they grow more powerful and main to U.S. nationwide security decision-making, intelligence AIs will become crucial nationwide assets that must be defended against enemies seeking to compromise or manipulate them. The intelligence community must purchase developing secure AI models and in developing requirements for "red teaming" and constant evaluation to secure against potential dangers. These groups can use AI to replicate attacks, uncovering potential weak points and establishing methods to alleviate them. Proactive procedures, consisting of cooperation with allies on and financial investment in counter-AI technologies, will be vital.

THE NEW NORMAL

These challenges can not be wished away. Waiting too wish for AI innovations to totally mature carries its own risks; U.S. intelligence capacities will fall back those of China, Russia, and other powers that are going complete steam ahead in developing AI. To make sure that intelligence-whether time-sensitive cautions or longer-term tactical insight-continues to be a benefit for the United States and its allies, the nation's intelligence neighborhood requires to adjust and innovate. The intelligence services must rapidly master the use of AI technologies and make AI a fundamental aspect in their work. This is the only sure way to make sure that future U.S. presidents receive the very best possible intelligence assistance, remain ahead of their adversaries, and protect the United States' delicate abilities and operations. Implementing these changes will need a cultural shift within the intelligence neighborhood. Today, intelligence analysts mainly build products from raw intelligence and information, with some assistance from existing AI designs for voice and imagery analysis. Moving on, intelligence authorities need to explore consisting of a hybrid method, in line with existing laws, using AI models trained on unclassified commercially available data and fine-tuned with classified details. This amalgam of innovation and standard intelligence event might lead to an AI entity offering instructions to images, signals, open source, and measurement systems on the basis of an integrated view of regular and anomalous activity, automated images analysis, and automatic voice translation.

To accelerate the shift, intelligence leaders must promote the benefits of AI integration, highlighting the enhanced abilities and effectiveness it offers. The cadre of recently appointed chief AI officers has been established in U.S. intelligence and defense to serve as leads within their firms for promoting AI development and getting rid of barriers to the technology's execution. Pilot tasks and early wins can build momentum and confidence in AI's abilities, encouraging broader adoption. These officers can leverage the proficiency of nationwide labs and other partners to test and fine-tune AI designs, guaranteeing their effectiveness and security. To institutionalize change, leaders must develop other organizational rewards, including promotions and training opportunities, to reward innovative approaches and those employees and systems that show reliable usage of AI.

The White House has produced the policy needed for using AI in national security firms. President Joe Biden's 2023 executive order regarding safe, safe and secure, and credible AI detailed the assistance needed to fairly and securely use the technology, and National Security Memorandum 25, released in October 2024, is the nation's fundamental method for harnessing the power and handling the threats of AI to advance national security. Now, Congress will require to do its part. Appropriations are needed for departments and companies to develop the infrastructure needed for development and experimentation, conduct and scale pilot activities and evaluations, and continue to purchase assessment abilities to guarantee that the United States is building reputable and high-performing AI innovations.

Intelligence and military communities are committed to keeping human beings at the heart of AI-assisted decision-making and have actually created the frameworks and tools to do so. Agencies will require guidelines for how their experts need to utilize AI models to make certain that intelligence items satisfy the intelligence community's requirements for dependability. The government will also require to maintain clear guidance for dealing with the data of U.S. citizens when it pertains to the training and usage of large language models. It will be essential to balance making use of emerging innovations with safeguarding the personal privacy and civil liberties of residents. This means augmenting oversight systems, updating appropriate frameworks to show the abilities and risks of AI, and fostering a culture of AI advancement within the national security apparatus that harnesses the potential of the technology while securing the rights and flexibilities that are foundational to American society.

Unlike the 1950s, when U.S. intelligence raced to the forefront of overhead and satellite imagery by establishing a number of the essential innovations itself, winning the AI race will need that community to reimagine how it partners with personal industry. The private sector, which is the main methods through which the government can understand AI progress at scale, is investing billions of dollars in AI-related research study, information centers, and computing power. Given those business' developments, intelligence agencies should focus on leveraging commercially available AI designs and fine-tuning them with categorized information. This method allows the intelligence community to quickly expand its capabilities without needing to go back to square one, permitting it to remain competitive with adversaries. A current partnership in between NASA and IBM to develop the world's biggest geospatial structure model-and the subsequent release of the model to the AI neighborhood as an open-source project-is an exemplary presentation of how this type of public-private partnership can work in practice.

As the nationwide security community integrates AI into its work, it must ensure the security and strength of its designs. Establishing standards to release generative AI securely is vital for maintaining the stability of AI-driven intelligence operations. This is a core focus of the National Security Agency's brand-new AI Security Center and its collaboration with the Department of Commerce's AI Safety Institute.

As the United States deals with growing competition to shape the future of the global order, it is urgent that its intelligence firms and military take advantage of the country's innovation and leadership in AI, focusing especially on big language models, to offer faster and more relevant details to policymakers. Only then will they gain the speed, breadth, and depth of insight needed to navigate a more intricate, competitive, and content-rich world.