Tulsi Gabbard relied on artificial intelligence to determine what to classify in the release of government documents on John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence fed the JFK files into an AI program, asking it to see if there was anything that should remain classified, she told a crowd at an Amazon Web Services conference Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.
It made reviewing the documents significantly faster, she added.
“We have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously—which was to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages,” Gabbard said during a speech at the Washington, D.C. summit.
The government released around 80,000 pages of files on JFK’s assassination—bereft of bombshells—in March, just two months into Trump’s second term. Without the use of AI, Gabbard said, the process could have taken months or years.
When the release was announced, Trump said he never intended to redact any part of the files.
“I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact,’” he said. “I said during the campaign I’d do it, and I am a man of my word.”
The thousand-plus documents that were delivered were difficult to parse: many were handwritten, impenetrable, and lacking a file number or agency, according to a New York Times analysis.
Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who became a Trump ally, signaled that she was eager to embrace AI on a broad scale, even as critics have sounded the alarm on the new technology’s potential pitfalls, particularly its credibility.
“There’s been an intelligence community chatbot that’s been deployed across the enterprise,” Gabbard said, according to MeriTalk. “Opening up and making it possible for us to use AI applications in the top secret clouds has been a game changer.”
Gabbard, who oversees the operations of America’s 18 different intelligence agencies, said at the conference that she would like to expand the intelligence community’s use of private-sector technology.
Gabbard intends to “look at the available tools that exist—largely in the private sector—to make it so that our intelligence professionals, both collectors and analysts, are able to focus their time and energy on the things that only they can do.”
Gabbard, a former Democrat, served as the U.S. representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021. She announced she was leaving the Democrats for Trump in August last year.
Since signing on to the Trump administration, Gabbard has signaled a willingness to upend the status quo.
Last month, NBC News reported that Gabbard was trying to turn Trump’s press briefing into Fox News-style broadcasts, because the president “doesn’t read.”
Gabbard also ordered intelligence officials to rewrite a report in February so that it couldn’t be “used against” Trump, The New York Times reported.
Another Trump official, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. landed in hot water last month when a report he published was riddled with errors—seemingly caused by the use of generative AI.
