The CIA and other US intelligence agencies will soon have an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT. The program, revealed on Tuesday by Bloomberg, will train on publicly available data and provide sources alongside its answers so agents can confirm their validity. The aim is for US spies to more easily sift through ever-growing troves of information, although the exact nature of what constitutes "public data" could spark some thorny privacy issues. "We've gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going," Randy Nixon, the CIA's director of Open Source Enterprise, said in an interview with Bloomberg. "We have to find the needles in the needle field."

A US intelligence director says a lot of espionage is more boring than you might think, and much of it could be handed over to artificial intelligence. "A significant chunk of the time, I will send [my employees] to a dark room to look at TV monitors to do national security essential work," Robert Cardillo, head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency told reporters including Foreign Policy. "But boy is it inefficient." Cardillo calls out recent advances in artificial intelligence, giving algorithms the ability to analyze vast amounts of images and video to find patterns, give data about the landscape, and identify unusual objects. This kind of work is critical for assessing national security concerns like foreign missile-silo activity, or even just to check in on North Korean volleyball games.