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The future of intelligence analysis: US-Australia project on AI and human machine teaming

By William Usher, Dr Alex Caples, Katherine Kurata and Nandita Balakrishnan

Rapid advances in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies since late 2022, particularly the deployment of Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated the potential for AI to revolutionize how states conduct intelligence work. AI technologies are very likely to continue to rapidly advance given the large amount of investment from the private sector and nation states, with some experts predicting we will see the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a type of AI that achieves, or surpasses, human-level capacity for learning, perception, and cognitive flexibility – by the end of this decade. Even if this ambitious goal is not fully met, the LLMs available within the next three years will probably far surpass the capabilities of systems we use today and will be able to solve complex problems, take action to collect and sort data, and deliver well-reasoned assessments at scale and at speed.

There are opportunities for U.S. and Australian IC leaders to collaborate on the development and responsible deployment of AIs for intelligence analysis. Potential areas for cooperation include articulating ethical and analytic standards for the use of AI systems, exchanging findings from AI testing and evaluation programs, sharing best practices in the management of humanmachine teams, and piloting the use of AI to tackle discrete intelligence analysis problems on a shared high-side data cloud.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), this project seeks to illuminate AI's potential to enhance allsource intelligence analysis. The authors engaged experts from the national security and emerging technology sectors through a series of workshops held simultaneously in Canberra and Washington.