John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, announced on Tuesday that the agency was reorganizing to ensure that it can adopt technology faster and further develop offensive cyberoperations division.
He promised that the agency would use new technology more aggressively and take “smart risks,” even as it prioritized human decision making and oversight of artificial intelligence and other innovations.
The changes are intended to strengthen the C.I.A.’s ability to collect intelligence by gaining access to additional computer networks or communications, or even just locating additional potential human sources. The overhaul, Mr. Ratcliffe said, is an acknowledgment that in the modern world, digital borders are as important as physical borders.
In his first major address as C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe said artificial intelligence is raising the stakes in America’s competition with its adversaries, since the new technology is itself a transformative weapon.
“In conversations with many of the president’s other national security and economic security advisers, we’re talking about the impact of these frontier A.I. models,” he said. “It would be, as we’ve talked about, not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons.”
To improve its collection, both through human spies and eavesdropping on communication networks, “more C.I.A. officers are going to have to become just as comfortable with handling lines of code as they are with handling human assets and sources,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.
In a brief interview after the speech, Mr. Ratcliffe said the capabilities of the new generation of artificial intelligence model had promoted hard thinking about cyberdefenses and cyberoffensive operations.
“These capabilities, it is fair to say, surprised everyone in terms of what that iteration was capable of versus what was predicted about where A.I. was going to go.”
Mr. Ratcliffe said all the major A.I. firms were developing similar models that were “almost like a doomsday device.”
Artificial intelligence has allowed the United States to find deficiencies in American adversity. For now, Mr. Ratcliffe said, the United States was on “the right side of the equation” and had the lead on foreign companies in the race to build the best A.I. models.
But despite the focus on artificial intelligence and other new technologies, Mr. Ratcliffe said human beings, not computer models, would remain the decision makers.
Good intelligence, he said in the interview, “is always going to require good judgment at the end of the day. We are never going to yield to technology completely to make decisions.”
In his speech, Mr. Ratcliffe went through the agency’s recent successes, including precisely locating President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela so that Delta Force commandos could seize him from a military compound and identifying the location of a downed airman from the F-15E that crashed in Iran in March.
Mr. Ratcliffe offered no new details of how the C.I.A. found the airman but attributed that success to the agency’s technological advances.
“It was a search that rested on our innovation, creativity and our technological know-how, ” Mr. Ratcliffe said. “And ultimately it was a technology-enabled search that only the C.I.A. could successfully, and did successfully, pull off.”
He also said that drone technology and other advances had transformed how armies fight, and described the new dangers on the battlefield.
Mr. Ratcliffe noted that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the frontline in Ukraine was less than 35 minutes. “Much of the reason is technology and how drones have become super-efficient, low-cost killing machines,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.
He avoided discussing the C.I.A.’s directorate of science and technology so as not to interfere with the inquiry into a member who was found with more than $40 million in gold bars in his home, according to court papers.
The division has come under scrutiny from the F.B.I., the White House and Congress since the official’s arrest in May.
But he announced a broad reorganization of another technology-focused arm of C.I.A., the Directorate of Digital Innovation.
The organization, which has been renamed the Directorate of Mission Systems, will focus on defensive cybersecurity and data infrastructure.
C.I.A. officers specializing in offensive cyberoperations are now part of a new mission center, the Center for Cyber Intelligence. The center has been in operation since last year and has allowed the agency to deploy new offensive cybertools.
In the interview, Mr. Ratcliffe said Democrats and Republicans have both said the U.S. government needs to do more with offensive cyberoperations.
“Members of Congress have asked why aren’t we doing more offensively on cyber, why aren’t we taking it to our adversaries more aggressively,” Mr. Ratcliffe said. “By elevating it, we also are prioritizing it and saying how can we develop more accesses and operations that our customers are demanding.”
Mr. Ratcliffe said the agency would also work to improve how it teams up with private industry, which was also a priority of his predecessor, William J. Burns. But in recent months, Mr. Ratcliffe said the agency has more rapidly adopted new technologies developed by the private sector.
“The whole process often took three years or even more,” he said in the speech. “By that time, that technology had become outdated.”
The C.I.A., he said, was now adopting new technology within six months.
Mr. Ratcliffe made his remarks at a summit sponsored by Amazon Web Services, which is the biggest provider of the classified cloud computing networks that are used by the C.I.A. and many other spy agencies for data-intensive analysis.
Shortly before Mr. Ratcliffe spoke, senior officials from Amazon Web Services announced that it was making new investments that would make it easier for government contractors to develop classified applications and help intelligence agencies move more work to classified cloud.
Amazon Web Services said it would invest to create new computing centers for private companies that are as secure as the government’s classified cloud. The new data centers will allow military contractors and others to develop software and systems that can be smoothly adapted for classified government work.
Dave Levy, a vice president at Amazon Web Services, also announced that the company would invest $1 billion to help the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies move older systems to a modern, high-speed cloud.
Mr. Ratcliffe said the agency planned to continue to evaluate and evolve its technology divisions, paying close attention to investments by adversarial countries.
“We have to balance the realities of the age in which we live,” he said. “We are not done. There is not an endpoint to this.”
