SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Artificial intelligence is changing the way that countries spy on each other and gather intelligence. That's according to Anne Neuberger, who's the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology. In a new piece in Foreign Affairs, she argues the U.S. needs to prepare for the threats that AI poses to national security and that the U.S. has a lot of work to do to benefit from this technology and protect itself from bad actors. Anne Neuberger joins me now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ANNE NEUBERGER: It's good to be here with you.
DETROW: I think a lot of people listening are thinking about AI or interacting with AI through chat bots, things like ChatGPT, right? You are arguing AI in a different way is a useful tool in espionage. Can you start by just explaining how and why?
NEUBERGER: Absolutely. So think about a group of intelligence analysts who are trying to see if a given country will be doing a missile launch in the next few days. So they'll use a combination of imagery, taking pictures of the area, of signals collection, individuals who may be part of that role and listening to their planning work. And they work to bring that together, and they work to do that quickly to provide, for example, warning to a community that's looking to defend against those potential missiles. That official intelligence both allows to compress that, to deliver it more quickly and to also integrate across those different intelligence disciplines quickly.
DETROW: I think TikTok is in the news and in people's minds in a lot of ways in recent days. Is that one of the areas that you're thinking about as you write this, as you've crafted these policies?
NEUBERGER: The danger of TikTok is it is the major platform by which Americans - young Americans are gaining their news. TikTok and the company have - the Chinese government itself censors information it provides its own citizens. So the risk that in a country like America, in a democracy where each person's voice and vote matters, that a platform where Americans are getting their primary source of information is controlled by a country that censors the information for its own people - that's a significant risk.
DETROW: This is a field that is changing so rapidly week to week, month to month. Major changes over the course of the Biden administration, obviously, that comes to a close, and a new set of people are coming in and taking on posts like yours. What would you say to somebody stepping into the job? Like, what are the things that have been top of your mind that you think that makes the most sense to be thinking about as you're trying to craft policy in an area like this?
NEUBERGER: Using AI to more quickly pull information together, whether it's images or voice - to pull that together to alert on a potential threat and avoid a terror attack, avoid a cyberattack, there's tremendous promise in sense-making of that. And on the flip side, as we see around...
DETROW: Can I actually hop in on one follow up, though? There's obviously a big upside to quickly identifying threats. But when a specific person is flagged as a threat and they are not in fact a threat, there are tremendous downsides as well. How do you balance the speed of the analysis with making sure big mistakes aren't being made?
NEUBERGER: I talk about in the piece. The United States must challenge ourselves to be first, first to benefit from AI, first to protect itself from enemies who might use it, and first to use AI in line with the laws and values of a democracy because those risks you talk about are real. And we need to build the protections for that and a constant evaluation - it's not a one-time thing - into that to ensure we're doing so in line with who we are as Americans.
DETROW: That's Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology on the U.S. National Security Council and the outgoing Biden administration. Her piece in Foreign Affairs is titled "Spy Vs. AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Remake Espionage." Thank you so much.
NEUBERGER: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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