The heads of foreign intelligence operations on both sides of the Atlantic have teamed up to reveal the importance of working with private sector partners to progress use of tech

The heads of the UK and US overseas intelligence services have revealed that the two organisations are each using generative artificial intelligence to help derive intel.

Richard Moore, chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service – commonly known as MI6 – and Richard Burns, director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have published in the Financial Times a jointly authored piece outlining how “the challenges of the past are being accelerated in the present, and compounded by technological change”.

To help keep pace with this change, the security services both sides of the Atlantic are working increasingly closely not only with counterparts in the intelligence community, but via “a network of partnerships with the private sector” – particularly in the AI sphere.

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“We are now using AI, including generative AI, to enable and improve intelligence activities — from summarisation to ideation to helping identify key information in a sea of data,” the duo wrote. “We are training AI to help protect and ‘red team’ our own operations to ensure we can still stay secret when we need to. We are using cloud technologies so our brilliant data scientists can make the most of our data, and we are partnering with the most innovative companies in the US, UK and around the world.”

The two leaders said that the ongoing war in Ukraine “has demonstrated that technology, deployed alongside extraordinary bravery and traditional weaponry, can alter the course of war”.

The conflict “has been the first war of its kind to combine open-source software with cutting-edge battlefield technology, harnessing commercial and military satellite imagery, drone technology, high and low sophistication cyber warfare, social media, open-source intelligence, uncrewed aerial and seaborne vehicles and information operations — as well as human and signals intelligence — at such incredible pace and scale,” they added.