The CIA Let AI Write Its First Intelligence Report—And AI ‘Coworkers’ Are Up Next

The CIA recently used AI to generate an intelligence report without a human analyst directing it. Deputy Director Michael Ellis confirmed the milestone at 1pm on Thursday Special Competitive Studies Project event, which marks a shift from quiet experiments to a public declaration of ambition.

Ellis said the agency completed more than 300 AI projects last year. Politics reports. Somewhere in that pile, a machine independently produced an intelligence product – a first in the service’s history.

The near-term roadmap is more incremental. Analysts would have AI “peers” embedded in agency analytics platforms to handle drafting, editing for clarity, and benchmarking results against craft standards. People would still end up endorsing the results. But the goal is speed: getting intelligence products to market faster than a human-only pipeline would allow.

Within a decade, Ellis said, CIA operatives will manage teams of AI agents operating as “autonomous mission partners,” a hybrid model that scales intelligence collection in ways no human workforce can match on its own.

The CIA has been building this for years. In 2023, the intelligence community announced its own AI chatbot to help staffers analyze surveillance data. By 2024, CIA Director Bill Burns and MI6 Chief Richard Moore jointly announced that they were actively using generative AI for content triage, analyst support, and tracking how foreign adversaries deployed the technology. Ellis’ comments push that public timeline forward significantly.

Earlier this year, Anthropic declined to relax restrictions that bar its tools from domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons applications. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by labeling Anthropic’s products a “supply chain risk.” President Trump then ordered every federal agency to phase out anthropic tools. The company has legally challenged the measure.

Ellis didn’t mention Anthropic, but the message came across clearly. The CIA “cannot allow the whims of a single company” to restrict the use of AI, he said, and the agency is actively diversifying across suppliers to remain operationally flexible.

Ellis also noted that the CIA has doubled down on its technology-focused foreign intelligence reporting, mapping how adversaries like China are deploying AI in semiconductors, cloud computing and R&D. The agency’s Center for Cyber ​​Intelligence was elevated to a full-fledged mission center — a move Ellis described as crucial, given that “the battle for cybersecurity will be a battle for artificial intelligence.”