U.S. spies want AI as tool against China if tech can be trusted

U.S. intelligence agencies are grappling with a daunting new challenge: Making artificial intelligence safe for America’s spies.

An arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is tapping companies and colleges to help harness rapidly developing AI technology that could provide an edge against global competitors like China. The challenge is ensuring it doesn’t open a backdoor into the nation’s top secrets or generate fake data.

"The intelligence community wants to avail itself of the large-language models out there, but there are a lot of unknowns,” said Tim McKinnon, a data scientist who manages one of the ODNI’s projects, known as Bengal. "The end goal is being able to work with a model with trust.”