CIA restructures tech, acquisition offices for the age of AI

The CIA has reorganized several of its key acquisition and tech directorates to better embrace emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing as they reshape “the reality of conflict and asymmetric warfare,” Director John Ratcliffe said Tuesday.

During rare public remarks at the AWS DC Summit, Ratcliffe pointed to recent CIA-supported operations in Venezuela and the Middle East, including the rescue of a downed F-15E Strike Eagle pilot in Iran, as examples of the outsized impact of technology on the agency’s intelligence operations. 

“It was a search that rested on our innovation, creativity, and our technological know-how, and ultimately it was a technology-enabled search that only the CIA could successfully and did successfully pull off,” the director said of the rescue effort, which he described as “the equivalent of trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Recognizing there’s no shortage of conflict or crisis around the globe, Ratcliffe said the CIA does not have the luxury of relying on what’s worked in the past. Instead, the agency must position itself as a leader in adopting cutting-edge technologies.

“Increasingly, all of our future successes are going to depend on technology,” he said. “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.”

With that in mind, the CIA has undertaken a “fundamental reshaping” of its “entire approach to technology,” Ratcliffe said. That includes overhauling its digital innovation office, reconstructing its commercial tech procurement strategy, streamlining communication channels with industry and elevating its offensive cyber capabilities as a core mission function.

What was previously the CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation is now the Directorate of Mission Systems, taking away the offensive cyber and open-source responsibilities of the former, and instead streamlining the agency’s digital efforts to focus on “core functions like cybersecurity and advanced data and infrastructure services.”

Ratcliffe said this move would “dramatically strengthen the foundation of our entire information technology architecture” and came from the recognition that “we must have the most advanced and resilient technology foundation, we must draw from the innovation that exists in the private sector and quickly integrate that into our agency systems, and that we must give our new tools to every officer in every position at the speed of mission required to do the job well.”

As part of that restructuring, the agency is undertaking an “aggressive data sprint … to enhance the discovery and exploitation of all of our mission data,” he said.

“We will drive data standardization across the entire agency, increase our ability to better integrate all of our holdings and train our officers on how to use all of our new capabilities,” Ratcliffe said.

Earlier this year, the agency announced its new commercial technology acquisition framework, led by Chief Procurement Officer Effie Fragogiannis. While still nascent, the framework is delivering on its charge to complete most commercial tech acquisitions in six months or less, Ratcliffe said, with an early result of “nearly 400 acquisitions” in the months since it launched, “something that previously would have taken several years.”

And to better give industry partners a single point of contact with the CIA, the agency created an Office of Corporate Partnerships, which he said has already opened its doors to engage with companies like SpaceX, Amazon, Google and Dell.

Finally, acknowledging the need to “be better positioned than ever to put forth a strong defense and offense against our adversaries,” Ratcliffe shared that the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence has been elevated to a mission center, taking on the offensive cyber responsibilities shed by the restructuring of the Directorate of Digital Innovation into the Directorate of Mission Systems. 

“Look, we need to protect not only our physical borders in this country, but just as importantly, our digital borders by wielding both a sword with regard to CCI, and a shield with regard to DMS to deter, to degrade, and to disrupt attacks upon our critical infrastructure,” he said.

As he concluded his remarks, Ratcliffe explained that, with these organizational changes, the CIA is “going to do everything we can to deliver” the best AI tools to its officers, calling artificial intelligence “a domain in which the CIA must excel, because every algorithmic decision has implications for U.S. strategic advantage and for the national security of all of our people.”

“We’re going to take smart risks, we’re going to experiment, and then we’re going to course correct as we go,” he said. “We simply can’t afford to wait for a risk-free approach when it comes to emerging technologies. It doesn’t exist. We have to move fast, we have to be aggressive, and we have to take full advantage of the ingenuity that sets America apart. That’s the only way to make sure that the CIA continues to operate at the cutting edge of technology.”

Notably, AWS at its summit announced the launch of a $1 billion incentive program for the intelligence community that the company said is “designed to eliminate the migration costs that have kept some [intelligence workloads] locked in on-premises systems.”

“The program is simple: migrate qualified workloads to AWS, receive credits. Up to $1 billion is available through October 2030 for all IC agencies on the existing AWS contract,” the company said in a release.

The CIA, a longtime customer of AWS for cloud technologies, will look to use the program, according to Amazon.