C.I.A.’s Chatbot Stands In for World Leaders

Understanding leaders around the world is one of the C.I.A.’s most important jobs. Teams of analysts comb through intelligence collected by spies and publicly available information to create profiles of leaders that can predict behaviors.

A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence now helps do that work.

Over the last two years, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed a tool that allows analysts to talk to virtual versions of foreign presidents and prime ministers, who answer back.

“It is a fantastic example of an app that we were able to rapidly deploy and get out to production in a cheaper, faster fashion,” said Nand Mulchandani, the C.I.A.’s chief technology officer.

The chatbot is part of the spy agency’s drive to improve the tools available to C.I.A. analysts and its officers in the field, and to better understand adversaries’ technical advances. Core to the effort is to make it easier for companies to work with the most secretive agency.

William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director for the past four years, prioritized improving the agency’s technology and understanding of how it is used. Incoming Trump administration officials say they plan to build on those initiatives, not tear them down.

In his confirmation hearing, John Ratcliffe, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the C.I.A., said the agency had “struggled to keep pace” as technological innovation had shifted from the public to private sectors. But Mr. Ratcliffe spoke in positive terms about Mr. Burns’s efforts and said he would expand them because “the nation who wins the race in the emerging technologies of today will dominate the world of tomorrow.”