The State of Research on the Integration of AI and U.S. Intelligence: Official Study

In order to ensure that the U.S. military maintains a leading position in the field of artificial intelligence, the U.S. Department of Defense clearly identified artificial intelligence as a key technology field to ensure that the U.S. wins future wars in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, and formulated the 2018 DoD Artificial Intelligence Strategy accordingly. In the strategy outline, the Ministry of National Defense not only proposes the concept of artificial intelligence in enhancing decision-making and planning and other auxiliary operations, but also analyzes the ethics and security of artificial intelligence in the military field for the first time.

In fact, not only at the level of the Department of Defense, several major U.S. military services have relatively independent research on artificial intelligence, and there is no lack of exploration of integrating artificial intelligence into the intelligence field. The Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (A2I2) under the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has long focused on the Army's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) operations in urban combat environments. It is hoped that artificial intelligence can be used to enhance combat capabilities, and to find a unique way to integrate artificial intelligence with soldier knowledge and intelligence, so as to gain an advantage in battlefield intelligence competition. Commissioned by the U.S. Department of Naval Operations, the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) also released the "Navy Artificial Intelligence Framework" report in 2019. The report puts forward requirements for the application of artificial intelligence in naval intelligence and the required data, attaches great importance to the legality of data used to train artificial intelligence algorithms, and also emphasizes the human-machine collaboration based on human "judgment". In addition, the U.S. Air Force also released its "2019 Artificial Intelligence Strategy" in September 2019. The strategy demonstrates the Air Force's conception of using artificial intelligence to gain superiority in aerospace and cyberspace, and especially reflects the Air Force's emphasis on using open source software, algorithms, and data to support intelligence and combat operations.

In general, as far as the documents and departmental research reports issued by the U.S. government and military are concerned, most of them propose guiding principles for the application of artificial intelligence in the intelligence field at the policy level, and few involve relatively specific practical guidance. However, most of the studies have shown concern about the ethical and security issues of artificial intelligence, and various departments have also put forward corresponding requirements for the combination of intelligence work and artificial intelligence in this field. This shows that U.S. officials not only attach importance to promoting the rapid application of artificial intelligence, but also have relatively high vigilance and rational decision-making capabilities.