The Central Intelligence Agency aims to integrate artificial intelligence-powered “coworkers” into analysts’ workflows in coming years, a top official said Thursday.
CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said these AI coworkers would be housed in agency analytics platforms to help humans with basic tasks.
“It won’t do the thinking for our analysts, but it will help draft key judgments, edit for clarity and compare drafts against tradecraft standards,” Ellis said in a speech at a Special Competitive Studies Project event on AI and the intelligence community. The AI tools would help triage and flag trends for human analysts to review.
And within a decade, Ellis said, the CIA will treat AI tools as an “autonomous mission partner” and officers will manage teams of AI agents in a hybrid model to increase the speed and scale of intelligence work.
Last year, the agency had more than 300 AI projects, and, for the first time in its history, used AI used to generate an intelligence report, he said.
Ellis’ remarks provide a rare public glimpse into how the spy agency is integrating frontier AI systems into its day-to-day operations, and the expectation that they will soon become part of officers’ workflows.
The CIA primarily executes and coordinates human intelligence-gathering overseas, often undercover. Officers recruit and manage foreign assets to clandestinely gather intelligence in areas such as economics, terrorism, and cyber threats.
Much of that work involves the use of technology, though some argue that advanced AI tools may reinvigorate old-school tradecraft techniques.
But there have been benefits to technological investments. The agency recently elevated its Center for Cyber Intelligence into an entire mission center, a move that’s “paying dividends already by allowing us to deploy new tools to the field and gain more access to priority targets,” Ellis said.
“The battle of cybersecurity will be a battle of artificial intelligence,” and whoever best harnesses AI models will wield “enormous power,” he said. “Having a new mission center centered around cyber intelligence will put us on the path to secure the upper hand.”
The agency also recently announced a new acquisition framework to better integrate technology.
Ellis said the CIA doubled its technology-related foreign intelligence reporting, to track how foreign adversaries like China are using advanced AI and other technologies. Those intelligence products focus on technology use abroad and can include findings on areas like semiconductors, cloud computing, infrastructure, cybersecurity or R&D.
Ellis did not mention Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, a consortium announced earlier this week meant to help secure critical software against AI-driven attacks. The project was fueled by a powerful, non-public Anthropic frontier model the company says has already uncovered thousands of vulnerabilities but could be weaponized in the wrong hands.
The intelligence community and its industry suppliers are already examining and discussing how such a model may impact the future of cyber missions, Nextgov/FCW reported Wednesday.
Earlier this year, Anthropic declined to ease restrictions that kept its tools from being used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. That led the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to designate the company’s products as a “supply chain risk” designation and President Trump to order that all federal agencies phase out their uses of Anthropic tools. The company has legally challenged the move.
Ellis did not single out Anthropic, but he cautioned that the CIA “cannot allow the whims of a single company” to constrain its use of AI and said the agency is looking to diversify across multiple vendors to preserve operational freedom.
