US Spies Should Tap Private AI Models, NSA’s Research Chief Says
A top US spy official said intelligence agencies should use commercially available AI to keep up with foreign adversaries that will do the same — while being sure to address the risks to privacy and broader concerns about misuse of the fast-developing technology.
“The intelligence community needs to find a way to take benefit of these large models without violating privacy,” Gilbert Herrera, director of research at the National Security Agency, said in an interview. “If we want to realize the full power of artificial intelligence for other applications, then we're probably going to have to rely on a partnership with industry.”
Herrera said he wants the NSA to be able to use large commercial AI models that are trained on the open Internet, citing companies that can access massive amounts of data such as Meta's Facebook, Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Microsoft Corp., which also owns GitHub, used as a repository for code by software developers.
He acknowledged that using commercially available AI models risks importing potentially biased algorithms into classified spying missions. He said intelligence needs can be met without accessing the underlying data of American people and companies used to train and develop the models.
“If we used a model that was trained on the world, then we wouldn't have access to the data, we would only have the decision trees, that would yield the information that we wanted out of it,” he said on the sidelines of a summit on modern conflict held at Vanderbilt University,
The National Security Council and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Herrera's warning came after Vice President Kamala Harris met Thursday with the chief executive
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