WASHINGTON — CIA Director John Ratcliffe announced on Tuesday that the agency was reorganizing to ensure that it can adopt technology faster and further develop offensive cyberoperations division.

He promised that the agency would use new technology more aggressively and take “smart risks,” even as it prioritized human decision making and oversight of artificial intelligence and other innovations.

The changes are intended to strengthen the CIA’s ability to collect intelligence by gaining access to additional computer networks or communications, or even just locating additional potential human sources. The overhaul, Ratcliffe said, is an acknowledgment that in the modern world, digital borders are as important as physical borders.

In his first major address as CIA director, Ratcliffe said artificial intelligence is raising the stakes in America’s competition with its adversaries, since the new technology is itself a transformative weapon.

“In conversations with many of the president’s other national security and economic security advisers, we’re talking about the impact of these frontier AI models,” he said. “It would be, as we’ve talked about, not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons.”

To improve its collection, both through human spies and eavesdropping on communication networks, “more CIA officers are going to have to become just as comfortable with handling lines of code as they are with handling human assets and sources,” Ratcliffe said.

In a brief interview after the speech, Ratcliffe said the capabilities of the new generation of AI model had promoted hard thinking about cyber defenses and cyber offensive operations.

“These capabilities, it is fair to say, surprised everyone in terms of what that iteration was capable of versus what was predicted about where AI was going to go.”

Ratcliffe said all the major AI firms were developing similar models that were “almost like a doomsday device.”

Artificial intelligence has allowed the United States to find deficiencies in American adversity. For now, Ratcliffe said, the U.S. was on “the right side of the equation” and had the lead on foreign companies in the race to build the best AI models.

But despite the focus on AI and other new technologies, Ratcliffe said human beings, not computer models, would remain the decision makers.

Good intelligence, he said in the interview, “is always going to require good judgment at the end of the day. We are never going to yield to technology completely to make decisions.”

In his speech, Ratcliffe went through the agency’s recent successes, including precisely locating President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela so that Delta Force commandos could seize him from a military compound and identifying the location of a downed airman from the F-15E that crashed in Iran in March.

He also said that drone technology and other advances had transformed how armies fight, and described the new dangers on the battlefield.

Ratcliffe noted that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the front line in Ukraine was less than 35 minutes. “Much of the reason is technology and how drones have become superefficient, low-cost killing machines,” Ratcliffe said.

He avoided discussing the CIA’s directorate of science and technology so as not to interfere with the inquiry into a member who was found with more than $40 million in gold bars in his home, according to court papers.

The division has come under scrutiny from the FBI, the White House and Congress since the official’s arrest in May.

But he announced a broad reorganization of another technology-focused arm of CIA, the Directorate of Digital Innovation.

The organization, which has been renamed the Directorate of Mission Systems, will focus on defensive cybersecurity and data infrastructure.

CIA officers specializing in offensive cyberoperations are now part of a new mission center, the Center for Cyber Intelligence. The center has been in operation since last year and has allowed the agency to deploy new offensive cyber tools.

Ratcliffe said the agency would also work to improve how it teams up with private industry, which was also a priority of his predecessor, William J. Burns. But in recent months, Ratcliffe said the agency has more rapidly adopted new technologies developed by the private sector.

“The whole process often took three years or even more,” he said in the speech. “By that time, that technology had become outdated.”

The CIA, he said, was now adopting new technology within six months.

Ratcliffe made his remarks at a summit hosted by Amazon Web Services, which is the biggest provider of the classified cloud computing networks that are used by the CIA and many other spy agencies for data-intensive analysis.

Dave Levy, a vice president at AWS, announced that the company would invest $1 billion to help the CIA and other intelligence agencies move older systems to a modern, high-speed cloud.

Ratcliffe said the agency planned to continue to evaluate and evolve its technology divisions, paying close attention to investments by adversarial countries.

“We have to balance the realities of the age in which we live,” he said. “We are not done. There is not an endpoint to this.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Julian E. Barnes/Finbarr O’Reilly
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