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Cake day: September 20th, 2025
  • allende2001@lemmygrad.mltoUnited States | News & Politics@lemmy.ml•The CIA is quietly using AI to build emulated versions of world leaders. In the absence of real intelligence, CIA tries to use artificial one.
    0·
    3 days ago

    Archive link: https://archive.ph/gDajY

    Full text (from January 21st, 2026):

    Spy Family

    The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been stepping up its efforts in the world of AI — including an eyebrow-raising use of chatbot tech.

    As the New York Times reports, the CIA has been quietly developing a platform that lets analysts “talk” to foreign leaders, in a bid to predict how they might react in certain situations. The human variety of this type of behavior-predicting analysis has been the bread and butter of the agency’s behind-the-scenes grunts for a very long time. Instead of painstakingly compiling “profiles” on world leaders based on public information and gathered intelligence, however, those analysts will engage in faux conversation with large language models (LLMs) trained on similar intelligence and information that’s presumably being fed into its training data.

    The NYT didn’t say how formally the chatbot has been deployed, or who helped develop it. However, an interview with the CIA’s first chief technology officer, ex-Pentagon AI czar Nand Mulchandani, reveals that its opacity is very much by design. Mulchadani, a Silicon Valley veteran, has a chart in his offices showing all the layers of approval it takes to get any private sector collaboration approved within the secretive agency. From handing issues with contracts to taking care of any project roadblocks, each step requires an incredible amount of bureaucracy and clandestine discussion — hurdles that the CIA acknowledges are hindering its quest to keep up with innovation and China, America’s main tech adversary.

    Training Day

    The agency’s now-CTO was, as the NYT notes, hired to help spearhead a forward-thinking sea change within the CIA. In the two-and-a-half years since he was brought on, Mulchadani has apparently made it easier for private companies to start working with the intelligence agency — and reading between the lines, it seems he’s held the hands of tech CEOs through the labyrinthine bureaucracy.

    “The more we share about how we employ technology, how we procure technology, what we’re going to do with it, will make companies want to work with us and want to team with us more,” explained Juliane Gallina, the deputy director of the CIA’s digital innovation arm, in an interview with the NYT.

    According to Gallina, the agency is looking to declassify and “expose a little bit” of its secret technological sauce to help procure private sector contracts.

    There was no mention, however, of whether the public will be given a look behind the curtain of what their tax dollars are helping to fund.

    More on spies: Hackers Apparently Stole the FBI’s Call Logs With Confidential Informants

  • allende2001@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•This reddit post about how NHS patients are having their data surveilled by an American defence contractor.
    0·
    11 days ago

    Full text of reddit post:

    I’ll keep this short because I’m genuinely fuming.

    I work in tech so I know companies hoard data. But this one hit different.

    I know a doctor who mentioned to me that Palantir, the American surveillance company that worked with ICE and the NSA, now has access to “operational data” from our NHS. I thought… that can’t include patient records, right?

    Turns out, under the Federated Data Platform contract, Palantir gets access to pseudonymised patient data across all of England. Read this: Medact - Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems

    That means my GP visits, my prescriptions, my hospital stays, all of it, flowing through their systems. There’s no consent screen. No checkbox. No “opt out of sharing with a US defence contractor”. Just a quiet government deal worth £330 million.

    And here’s the bit that made my blood boil: NYC’s public hospitals just dropped Palantir because of activist pressure. NYC hospitals were sharing private health data with Palantir. And they still walked away.

    But the UK? We’re doubling down. Palantir now has over half a billion pounds in UK contracts… MoD, FCA, police forces, even bloody councils.

    I tried to find out if I can request my data from Palantir. You can’t. They’re not a “healthcare provider” so GDPR gets weird. But they definitely have a digital shadow of me sitting on their servers.

    How is this legal? And what happens when Palantir gets bought by someone worse, or when a hacker breaches their systems, or when the government decides “operational data” suddenly includes names and addresses?

    Because “trust us” didn’t work for Google, for Facebook, or for any of the other companies that promised not to be evil.

    I’m genuinely considering a subject access request to my NHS trust just to see what they have on me