AI in Top-Secret Clouds Is a ‘Game Changer’ for IC, DNI Says

The intelligence community is leveraging the combined power of artificial intelligence and cloud computing to enhance efficiency, speed and quality of intelligence operations, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday during a keynote with Dave Levy, Amazon Web Services vice president of worldwide public sector, at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. 

“Opening up, making it possible for us to use AI applications in the top-secret clouds, has been a game changer,” Gabbard said. “Looking across all of the IC elements, these are tools that are better helping us get after our mission.”

AI Enables IC to Operationalize Intelligence

Gabbard cited the accelerated declassification efforts for historical documents, including those related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. What once took human analysts months or years of page-by-page review is now accomplished significantly faster through AI tools operating within these secure cloud platforms, she said. This not only speeds up transparency but also frees up valuable human expertise for more complex analytical tasks. This exponential improvement in processing capability, facilitated by the cloud’s vast storage and computational power, ensures that intelligence is operationalized more quickly, she said.

“Ten thousand hours of media content, for example, that normally would take eight people, 48 hours to comb through now takes one person one hour through the use of some of the AI tools that we have here,” Gabbard said.

Gabbard added that the integration of AI applications within secure, top-secret cloud environments has been a pivotal advancement to efficiency and interoperability. This capability allows the 18 intelligence agencies to securely process, analyze and store vast amounts of highly sensitive data, overcoming previous limitations in on-premise systems, Gabbard said. The cloud’s scalability and agility are crucial, enabling intelligence professionals to access robust computing resources on demand, a necessity for the computationally intensive nature of modern AI, she added.

“For us to be able to provide these efficiencies and these tools across the entire enterprise and to support those unique and specific tools for entities like NGA and NRO and the geo and space … is phenomenal,” said Gabbard. “Operationalizing intelligence so that we don’t collect intelligence just to have it, but to make sure it is applicable and usable and operational both for, for all of our customers.”

AWS Launches Secret-West Cloud Region

During the event, AWS announced its intention to launch one of these environments – AWS Secret-West, a second secret cloud region – this year. This new region will significantly expand cloud support for classified U.S. government missions, particularly at the secret classification level. According to Levy, the new region will enable defense and national security customers to deploy multi-region architectures, dramatically enhancing the resiliency and availability of their critical workloads.

“The launch of the AWS Secret-West Region will strengthen U.S. AI leadership and accelerate the development of advanced capabilities and groundbreaking innovation,” Levy said in a statement ahead of the summit.

Shifting Away from In-House Federal Tech Development

Gabbard also emphasized a strategic shift towards greater collaboration with the private sector. Recognizing that specialized technology — particularly in AI and cloud infrastructure — is often developed and refined outside government walls, Gabbard added that agencies are moving away from in-house federal tech development.

“I want to get us away from having the government trying to build tech solutions for itself,” said Gabbard. “It’s really not what the government is best at doing but really focusing on buying and purchasing solutions wherever we can, so that our workforce can really focus on the things that we are very good at and have exclusive responsibilities to fulfill.”