The Central Intelligence Agency is working on its own chatbot, the latest evidence of the growing importance of AI developments.

AI is the latest battleground tech, with companies and governments alike vying for dominance. The CIA wants to make use of generative AI and chatbots to help agencies process the massive amount of data intelligence they are now collecting.

“We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,” Randy Nixon, the CIA’s director of Open Source Enterprise, said in an interview with Bloomberg, via Engadget. “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

“The scale of how much we collect and what we collect on has grown astronomically over the last 80-plus years, so much so that this could be daunting and at times unusable for our consumers,” Nixon added. He hopes the AI will help analysis “pushing you the right information, one where the machine can auto-summarize, group things together.”

Nixon says US intelligence agencies will have access to the new tool “soon.”

The CIA’s efforts underscore just how important AI is, as well as its role as a surveillance tool. Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker has called AI “a surveillance technology.”