The Central Intelligence Agency is responsible for gathering information related to national security, providing updates to policymakers, and carrying out top-secret actions. He also runs an investment company called In-Q-Tel. According to the company’s website, its mission is “to be the trusted partner of choice to identify, evaluate, and leverage emerging commercial technologies for the U.S. national security community and America’s allies.”
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Sherwood News technology reporter John Keegan about the companies the CIA is investing in. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: It turns out that the CIA has an investment division. Please say more.
John Keegan: Oh, this is unusual. This company’s existence isn’t necessarily breaking news, but it’s an interesting moment to note. So in 1999, the CIA decided it needed to tap into the technology emerging from Silicon Valley. It was a very exciting time. This was around the time when the Internet was at its peak. All these companies were developing this amazing technology. And on the other side of the country, the CIA was watching, so they started a venture capital firm. This is a very unusual venture capital company. This is a non-profit and is looking for companies developing technology that may be useful.
Ryssdal: We’ll get into the technology they’re investing in in a moment. But I want people to get a sense of the magnitude and scale of this thing. Since you wrote In-Q-Tel in 2011, which is the name of this investment company that is a non-profit organization founded by the CIA, they have collected $1.2 billion in tax dollars over the last 13 or 14 years. . How does it work?
Keegan: So the company is going to go to the market and look at what’s going to be useful to the U.S. intelligence community and the defense community and see what interesting new technologies are coming out. They might come up to them and say, “You know what? “The bureaucracy has probably told you that you don’t need to work with the government.” This is kind of the antithesis of “move fast and break things.” But they say: We invest in your company and teach you how to do business with the government. That way you can help your country. ”
Ryssdal: John, the key word here is “dual use,” right? Dual-use technology. Please explain that a little.
Keegan: Well, dual use is a very important concept. Here, In-Q-Tel is looking for companies that have products already on the market but that could be advantageous to the intelligence and defense communities. So they might be looking for companies that advertise on their websites customer service tools that can, for example, detect the emotions of people who call a company’s customer service line. However, they are promoting the same tool to governments elsewhere on their website. So there are a lot of companies like that that have things that can be used in one sector of the economy and then put to other uses within the intelligence community.
Ryssdal: I would love to get there, but I think this is the subheading of this piece. “You can’t talk about the CIA without AI,” you write. (Artificial intelligence) plays a very important role in what In-Q-Tel is looking at.
Keegan: Yes, this is actually the largest category of companies that they invest in right now. As you know, unlike the CIA, whose financial situation is opaque, In-Q-Tel is a non-profit organization, so its tax returns are public, and its portfolio of companies in which it invests is posted to a large extent on its website. are sharing. If you take a look at their website, you can see some of the different applications within AI that they are considering. They do a lot of AI infrastructure and hosting companies, so companies like Databricks that can host these tools and train AI models. However, there are also many companies involved in geospatial and remote sensing. This could be a satellite company that can identify, for example, the number of cars in a shopping mall parking lot or the number of shipping containers moving into a port.
Ryssdal: I would say, interested listeners should go to this article. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see some of the companies In-Q-Tel has invested in. Last question, John, let me go. Is the CIA good at investing?
Keegan: Yeah, I’ve actually made some very smart bets in the past. One of the first companies they invested in was Keyhole. This is a satellite mapping app that later became Google Earth. They also invested in Palantir. It’s a data analytics company co-founded by (investor and political activist) Peter Thiel and is currently valued at about $80 billion. Also, they are no longer invested in the company. Well, it looks like they’re trying to get into the ground floor of some interesting companies and take these technologies and use them for secret purposes.
Ryssdal: Palantir is not without controversy.
Keegan: Yeah. They’ve definitely come under a lot of scrutiny regarding their collaboration with the defense community and how they use data tools.
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