Microsoft launches generative AI model designed exclusively for US intelligence services — air-gapped system for spies aims to avoid potential security leaks

AI technology has already proved instrumental in transforming and disrupting a wide range of industries, and really it’s just getting started.

Microsoft, which has gone “all-in” on artificial intelligence, has developed a generative AI model designed expressly for U.S. intelligence services. Unlike other AI platforms, such as Microsoft’s own Copilot, this one will be “air gapped” and won’t require a potentially unsafe connection to the internet.

Bloomberg notes, “It’s the first time a major large language model has operated fully separated from the internet… Most AI models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT rely on cloud services to learn and infer patterns from data, but Microsoft wanted to deliver a truly secure system to the US intelligence community.”

18 months of development

The tool will allow intelligence services to use AI for tasks such as analyzing vast swathes of classified data without the fear of data leaks or hacks that could potentially compromise national security.

William Chappell, Microsoft’s CTO for Strategic Missions and Technology, told Bloomberg that the company spent 18 months working on this special GPT-4-based tool which will be able to read and analyze content, answer questions and write code without needing to go online. Equally importantly, it reportedly won’t learn from, or be trained on, the data it is fed.

At a security conference last month, Sheetal Patel, assistant director of the CIA for the Transnational and Technology Mission Center, said, “There is a race to get generative AI onto intelligence data, and I want it to be us.”

More from TechRadar Pro

• These are the best AI writers around today
• More than half of Americans have tried generative AI already
• The evolution of cybersecurity in the age of generative AI