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CIA Director Announces New Division to Speed AI Adoption
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the agency will create a technology division to cut adoption timelines from three years to six months. He spoke at the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington.
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CIA Director John Ratcliffe announced plans to create a new division that will shorten technology adoption timelines from roughly three years to six months. Ratcliffe made the announcement during a keynote address at the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, his first major public speech as director.
He said the agency has not always been easy for private industry to work with and cited a cloud computing contract that took two years to decide after a legal dispute between International Business Machines Corporation and Amazon Web Services. Ratcliffe described the new division as a fundamental reshaping of the agency's approach rather than a simple reorganization.
He stated that agency technology played a major role in the January capture of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and the rescue of a downed F-15 pilot from inside Iran. Reports indicated that Anthropic's Claude model assisted in the Maduro operation and that an autonomous Saronic Corsair seaborne drone, operated by Task Force 59, rescued two airmen after an Iranian drone strike on an Apache helicopter.
Ratcliffe said future agency successes will depend on technology and that the nation best able to harness it will determine the global future. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in November 2025 creating the Genesis Mission to coordinate national AI efforts.
