How spy agencies are experimenting with the newest AI models

ON THE day of Donald Trump's inauguration as president, DeepSeek, a Chinese company, released a world-class large language model (LLM).

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It was a wake-up call, observed Mr Trump. Mark Warner, vicechair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says that America's intelligence community (IC), a group of 18 agencies and organisations, was "caught off guard".

Last year the Biden administration grew concerned that Chinese spies and soldiers might leap ahead in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). It ordered its own intelligence agencies, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy (which builds nuclear weapons), to experiment more adventurously with cutting-edge models and work more closely with "frontier" AI labs—principally Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI.

On July 14th the Pentagon awarded contracts worth up to $200m each to Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, as well as to Elon Musk's xAI—whose chatbot recently (and briefly) self-identified as Hitler after an update went awry—to experiment with "agentic" models. These can act on behalf of their users by breaking down complex tasks into steps and exercising control over other devices, such as cars or computers.

The frontier labs are busy in the spy world as well as the military one. Much of the early adoption has been in the area of LLM chatbots crunching top-secret data. In January Microsoft said that 26 of its cloud-computing products had been authorized for use in spy agencies. In June Anthropic said it had launched Claude Gov, which had been "already deployed by agencies at the highest level of US national security". The models are now widely used in every American intelligence agency, alongside those from competing labs.