CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Breitbart News last week that President Donald Trump’s administration is considering creating a national laboratory akin to the Manhattan Project to help develop and steer the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“When you talk about AI, one of the things I want to explore is whether we can expand and establish a national laboratory for the development of AI to help the U.S. government leverage emerging technology to make sure American leadership is that,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News in his first interview as CIA director last week. He was confirmed last week by the U.S. Senate into the position and spoke exclusively with Breitbart News about how he intends to, as directed by Trump, remove politics from the world’s most preeminent intelligence service and restore it to its critical functions of intelligence-gathering and preparing the U.S. government with the best possible information. Ratcliffe also told Breitbart News that he would be pushing to formally determine if COVID leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, something he has since done as director of the CIA.
Ratcliffe explained the idea for national laboratories dates back to the Manhattan Project, where the U.S. government helped scientists develop nuclear weapons that won World War II for the United States and allied nations. He said the recent announcement from Trump of “Project Stargate,” the half-trillion-dollar initiative to promote AI, could be expanded upon to include more public-private partnerships akin to the Manhattan Project that get the U.S. out in front of the nation’s adversaries on AI.
“You saw this initiative the president discussed—Project Stargate—which is the four-year, $500 billion AI infrastructure project that’s been proposed with all of our great technology companies,” Ratcliffe said. “We could expand on that with a public-private partnership where a government element could participate, and we’ve done this before—our constellation of national laboratories can be traced back to the Manhattan Project, which we used as a public-private partnership to develop the first nuclear weapon to win World War II. We need to be thinking about the ways we can do that to counter how our adversaries are using things like the cyber threats to their strategic advantage and putting our national security interests in a place where we’re able to harness the data and computational speed of AI to understand trends and events and threats and opportunities faster than our adversaries do.”
Ratcliffe also described AI as both a “huge opportunity” but also “a threat.” He said business leaders in the emerging technologies space like SpaceX’s Elon Musk—who also owns X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and is leading Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—play a critical role in helping the United States stay ahead of the rest of the world.
“What we know is our adversaries are currently trying to utilize AI and machine learning and the emerging technologies in that space to collect intelligence against us and to use that against American interests,” Ratcliffe said. “So the bottom line is we have to harness it and utilize it more effectively than our adversaries. I’m confident in our ability to do this. If you watched my confirmation, I talked about the fact that only one country in the world can parallel park a 200-foot rocket booster. The Chinese can’t do it, the Russians can’t do it, and the United States can’t do it without partnerships like we have with SpaceX and Elon Musk taking advantage of American innovation and ingenuity and the ability to do that. What I want to do as CIA director is find creative ways to partner with the private sector to take advantage of that American innovation and ingenuity without sacrificing our security and without losing our ability to protect our sources and methods. So to expand on that, and there’s a number of ways I think we can do that.”
More from Ratcliffe’s first exclusive interview as CIA director is forthcoming.
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