The CIA is starting to deploy artificial intelligence to boost one of its most hallowed missions: analyzing the plans, intentions and capabilities of foreign nations, the agency’s deputy director said Thursday.
Since its founding in 1947, the CIA has been the analytic hub of the U.S. intelligence community. Its officers parse through snippets of information collected by human spies and covert spy tools to craft holistic assessments of pressing issues for U.S. policymakers.
Now, the agency is starting to lean on AI to make that work more rigorous — and quicker, CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said Thursday during an event in Washington hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonprofit focused on tech and national security.
Ellis revealed that the agency recently used AI to create its first-ever autonomous intelligence report, and projected that AI’s role in its analysis work will only grow.
“Within the next couple of years, we will have AI co-workers built into all of the agency’s analytic platforms — a kind of classified version of generative AI that will help our analysts with basic tasks,” Ellis said.
Those tasks span the core elements of intelligence analysis: drafting key judgments, testing conclusions and spotting trends in information CIA pulls in from abroad, among others, he added.
He predicted AI could play an even more extensive role in crafting intelligence in the future, though he cautioned the agency plans to ensure “human beings are the ones making key decisions.”
President Donald Trump and other senior U.S. intelligence officials, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, have vowed to root out an alleged left-wing tilt within the intelligence community.
Ellis did not explicitly address that issue. But his speech hinted at how fights over the political valence of intelligence analysis may look different in an AI-centric future.
At one point, he said the agency will “not let private companies dictate how and when the CIA will make lawful use of their technologies” — an indirect swipe at AI giant Anthropic, which is locked in a tense legal battle with the Pentagon over its AI guardrails. The Pentagon last month designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company tried to set contractual limits on the use of its model for lethal attacks and mass surveillance.
The unprecedented maneuver came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referred to Anthropic as “woke” in social media posts, while Trump has accused it of being run by “left-wing nut jobs.”
America’s premier spy agency is also adopting AI for a range of other tasks beyond analysis.
The CIA tested 300 AI projects last year “to bring new capabilities to our mission,” such as processing large datasets and language translation, Ellis said. It’s also trying to get AI and other cutting-edge tech into the hands of its foreign officers collecting top-secret information on the military, political and economic activities of foreign powers, he added.
A key driver of that effort, Ellis argued, will be the CIA’s newly expanded Center for Cyber Intelligence, which oversees the agency’s clandestine hacking operations. He cast the CIA’s embrace of AI as a response to the White House’s push for federal agencies to rapidly adopt and deploy the technology.
He also said it was critical to maintain an edge on China, which he characterized as the country’s top adversary.
“Five to ten years ago, China was nowhere near America, in terms of technological innovation,” said Ellis. “That’s just not true today.”
Originally written by: John Sakellariadis
Source: Politico
Published on: 9 April 2026
Link to original article: CIA is trusting AI to help analyze intel from human spies
