CIA Director John Ratcliffe outlined plans to fast-track the adoption of artificial intelligence within the CIA, an agency known for being slow to adapt to the times.
Giving the keynote address at the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, his first major public speech as director, Ratcliffe outlined his plans to overhaul the agency’s approach to revolutionary new technologies such as AI and quantum computing.
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Ratcliffe said some of AI’s capabilities amounted to “digital nuclear weapons” that are “rewriting the reality of conflict.”
He addressed the agency’s previous difficulty in adopting new technologies.
“We recognize that when it comes to partnering with private industry, CIA hasn’t always been the easiest agency to work with,” he said.
One of the most infamous examples was the CIA’s contract to build a cloud computing service over a decade ago, an endeavor that took two years to decide, after a protracted legal dispute between the International Business Machines Corporation and Amazon Web Services.
Ratcliffe announced the creation of a new division at the agency responsible for adopting technologies, expediting adoption timelines from roughly three years to six months.
“If this all sounds like redrawn lines on an org chart, it isn’t,” he said. “This is a fundamental reshaping of CIA’s approach to technology.”
“Increasingly, all of our future successes are going to depend on technology,” Ratcliffe argued. “We have to continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible, because the nation that best harnesses the power of technology will determine the global future.”
He boasted of progress made so far in spearheading technological advancement. The director revealed that CIA technology was a major part of recent operations, including the capture of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in January and the rescue of a downed F-15 pilot from inside Iran. What technologies were used and which aspects were the doing of the CIA is unknown, but reports emerged that Anthropic’s Claude was used in the Maduro raid, not just in the planning stage but during the operation itself.
The operation to rescue the downed airman in Iran is more opaque, but some reports claimed a special technology that is able to detect heartbeats was used. After two airmen were downed in an Iranian drone strike on an Apache helicopter, an autonomous Saronic Corsair seaborne drone rescued them. The military group in control of the drone, Task Force 59, integrates AI into its operations.
President Donald Trump took power as the AI race entered a critical phase, with advanced models surpassing human intelligence in select areas. The Trump administration has focused on deregulation as a way to boost development but has also clashed with some AI companies, most notably Anthropic, over security concerns.
Operation Epic Fury became the first war in history to make extensive use of AI, with Claude helping to categorize and prioritize targets. Pentagon spokeswoman Kirsten Davies confirmed that Claude was used in the war.
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The Trump administration has been increasingly vocal about pushing the military and government employees to use AI. In November 2025, Trump signed an executive order establishing the “Genesis Mission,” which created a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.”
“The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership,” the order reads.
