Spy agencies have high hopes for AI

WHEN ITAINSAGCHQAIAI comes to using artificial intelligence (), intelligence agencies have been at it longer than most. In the cold war America’s National Security Agency () and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters () explored early to help transcribe and translate the enormous volumes of Soviet phone-intercepts they began hoovering up in the 1960s and 1970s.Yet the technology was immature. One former European intelligence officer says his service did not use automatic transcription or translation in Afghanistan in the 2000s, relying on native speakers instead. Now the spooks are hoping to do better. The trends that have made attractive for business in recent years—more data, better algorithms, and more processing power to make it all hum—are giving spy agencies big ideas, too.