C.I.A.’s Chatbot Stands In for World Leaders

Understanding leaders around the world is one of the C.I.A.’s most important jobs. Teams of analysts comb through intelligence collected by spies and publicly available information to create profiles of leaders that can predict behaviors.

A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence now helps do that work.

Over the last two years, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed a tool that allows analysts to talk to virtual versions of foreign presidents and prime ministers, who answer back.

“It is a fantastic example of an app that we were able to rapidly deploy and get out to production in a cheaper, faster fashion,” said Nand Mulchandani, the C.I.A.’s chief technology officer.

The chatbot is part of the spy agency’s drive to improve the tools available to C.I.A. analysts and its officers in the field, and to better understand adversaries’ technical advances. Core to the effort is to make it easier for companies to work with the most secretive agency.

William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director for the past four years, prioritized improving the agency’s technology and understanding of how it is used. Incoming Trump administration officials say they plan to build on those initiatives, not tear them down.

In his confirmation hearing, John Ratcliffe, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the C.I.A., said the agency had “struggled to keep pace” as technological innovation had shifted from the public to private sectors. But Mr. Ratcliffe spoke in positive terms about Mr. Burns’s efforts and said he would expand them because “the nation who wins the race in the emerging technologies of today will dominate the world of tomorrow.”

The C.I.A. has long used digital tools, spy gadgets and even artificial intelligence. But with the development of new forms of A.I., including the large language models that power chat bots, the agency has stepped up its investments.

Making better use of A.I., Mr. Burns said, is crucial to the U.S. competition with China. And better A.I. models have helped the agency’s analysts “digest the avalanche of open-source information out there,” he said.

The new tools have also helped analysts process clandestinely acquired information, Mr. Burns said. New technologies developed by the agency are helping spies navigate cities in authoritarian countries where governments use A.I.-powered cameras to conduct constant surveillance on their population and foreign spies.

“We’re making decent strides,” Mr. Burns said. “But I’d be the first to argue we’ve got to go faster and further.”

Shortly after Mr. Burns took up his job, he picked Dawn Meyerriecks, who led the agency’s directorate of science and technology from 2014 to 2021, to review the C.I.A.’s efforts.

The review pushed for something of a culture change. Ms. Meyerriecks said the C.I.A. had long believed that it could do everything itself. The agency had to make an adjustment and embrace the idea that some of the technology it needed had been developed by the commercial sector and was designed to keep information secure.

“There was really no reason that the C.I.A. couldn’t adopt and adapt commercial technology,” Ms. Meyerriecks said.

Under Mr. Burns, the agency created a technology-focused mission center to better understand the technology being used by China and other adversaries. And it hired Mr. Mulchandani, who helped found a series of successful start-ups before joining the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence center, as the agency’s first chief technology officer.

His mandate over the last two and a half years was to make it easier for private companies that had developed new technologies to be able to sell those applications and tools to the C.I.A.

The conundrums facing anyone wanting to do business with the agency are twofold. First, its needs are classified. How can you sell something to America’s spies if you do not know what they are doing or what they need? Second, there is the bureaucracy.

In his work space, Mr. Mulchandani unfurled a six-foot-long chart detailing the layers of approvals and other steps to get a contract with the agency.

Each of the rules was put in place for a reason — for example, to address a problem with a contract, or something else going wrong on a project. But the cumulative result is a set of regulations that has made it difficult for companies to work with government.

The C.I.A. is reviewing, and trying to prune, those rules. But it is also trying to be more open with technology companies about what it needs.

“The more we share about how we employ technology, how we procure technology, what we’re going to do with it, will make companies want to work with us and want to team with us more,” said Juliane Gallina, who leads the directorate of digital innovation for the C.I.A.

Ms. Gallina says the agency has taken the step to declassify some material to “expose a little bit” of the problem it is trying to overcome, so tech firms can compete for agency contracts.

The C.I.A. has long recognized the technology problem. A quarter century ago the agency helped found In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital fund, to help foster companies that could offer new technologies to the intelligence community. Its successes include helping expand firms like Palantir, a secretive data analytics company, and the company that became Google Earth.

But the C.I.A. also wants more established firms, or firms with other venture capital backing, to offer their ideas to the agency. That is where the bureaucratic clutter cutting comes in, along with efforts to change at least parts of the spy agency’s culture.

Many offices in the C.I.A. are warrens of cubicles or have clusters of desks for assistants. When Mr. Mulchandani started, he was given a space on the same floor as the C.I.A.’s top leadership, but he was not pleased.

Mr. Mulchandani recalled that the agency officer giving him the tour asked, “What is wrong?” He answered, “Everything.”

He was turned off by the small offices, the lack of natural light and the closetlike rooms for viewing the most classified of material. He ordered a renovation. The old offices were replaced by different spaces with movable desks for meetings and exchanging ideas. The goal was to make a space that echoed the workplaces of Silicon Valley — and signal to visiting entrepreneurs that the agency was ready to change.

“The space is going to drive the culture, a culture of talking,” Mr. Mulchandani said. “A slice of Silicon Valley on the seventh floor.”

Whether the cultural changes will stick is an open question. And adjusting the rules and cutting red tape is the work of years not months. But Mr. Mulchandani and the agency’s departing leadership are hopeful.

“Nobody will deny the fact that like tech is literally the single most disruptive force in the world today,” Mr. Mulchandani said. “And government and our own work is going to be completely dependent on tech and disrupted by tech. I can’t speak for the leadership coming in, but I don’t have any doubt in my mind that this is super top on their list.”