Governments have collected and analyzed intelligence for millennia, to give strategic advantage to stay ahead of potential crises and opportunities. Roman emperors dispatched spies to loiter in their enemies’ palaces, steal documents and eavesdrop, to gain strategic advantage. And the practice has never ceased, though it reached new heights of sophistication in the 20th century. Analysts gathered data, analyzed it together, and issued alerts. There is, however, a limit to the amount a human can do. The same is not true of artificial intelligence, and a system that makes use of this groundbreaking technology has the potential to revolutionize the intelligence community’s work. Such a system is still theoretical. Creating it is not, however, just a technological challenge. Rather, it is an intelligence imperative.
Intelligence analysts do not make policy. That is not their role. They provide assessments to policymakers—on adversary intent and capabilities, in particular—which are used as the basis for decisions. Intelligence analysts leverage a wide variety of sources to distinguish fact from fiction, synthesize data, and identify emerging threats and opportunities. They equip policymakers with the information necessary to pre-empt a crisis or seize a geopolitical advantage.
As Yogi Berra said, “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The intelligence community does its best in providing early warnings to policymakers but predicting a crisis or identifying a threat is never straightforward. A nation can be teetering on the edge of revolution, but knowing what will finally tip it over is difficult. Sometimes it comes from the expected; sometimes from the unexpected; and sometimes it does not come at all. In any case, prediction has been made more difficult by the scale and complexity of the modern world. Threats now scuttle through the digital, financial and informational domains. That has required the intelligence community to adjust. To stay ahead, it must integrate and master emerging technologies, particularly AI.
Put simply, AI-driven systems can help humans move faster, while considering a wider breadth of possibilities. From them can flow the early warnings and strategic insight that policymakers need. To drive the AI transformation of the intelligence community, it will first be necessary to solve the data problem. The problem is easily stated: there is an overwhelming quantity of data. The explosion of open-source data, in particular, has swamped intelligence analysts and, accordingly, demands new methods of ingestion, fusion, and validation so that no important piece of information is overlooked. Qualitative and quantitative inputs must be reconciled into cohesive, actionable intelligence.
When that has been done, it is necessary to fuse disparate models. AI tools offer specialized outputs. Some can model long-term instability; others focus on tactical timelines. These capabilities must be integrated to support cross-validation and scenario comparison. Scientific rigor and continuous refinement will be key. The objective is an AI-enabled simulation platform that runs thousands of strategic scenarios using observed and synthetic data. Through agentic AI, it will adapt in real time, guiding analysts not only to anomalies but also to what triggered them and what actions to consider next. No system will be perfect. But this one would give U.S. policymakers more time, foresight, and options.
This will require sustained, large-scale investment. But, by cultivating a diverse supplier base and deepening collaboration with allied intelligence services, the financial burden can be distributed across public and private entities, all working towards a common goal. Much of the innovation in AI is occurring outside the government. This investment is, as a consequence, a strategic necessity as well as an economic opportunity.
These tools will not replace human analysts. But they will help allocate scarce resources more effectively, which will ensure that the IC remains vigilant, adaptive, and ahead of the curve. The United States cannot afford to trail in this domain. Investing in AI for strategic warning is not merely a modernization initiative: it is a national security imperative.
This column is brought to you by Special Competitive Studies Project.