CIA Director John Ratcliffe revealed last week that President Donald Trump’s administration is exploring the idea of establishing a national laboratory, similar to the Manhattan Project, to drive the development and direction of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“When you talk about AI, one of the things I want to explore is whether we can expand and establish a national laboratory for the development of AI to help the U.S. government leverage emerging technology to make sure American leadership is that,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News in his first interview as CIA director.
Ratcliffe, confirmed last week by the U.S. Senate, spoke about his plans to fulfill the president’s directive to depoliticize the world’s leading intelligence agency and refocus it on its core missions of intelligence gathering and providing the U.S. government with the most accurate information possible.
Ratcliffe also shared that he would prioritize a formal investigation into whether COVID-19 originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—a step he has since taken becoming CIA director.
Ratcliffe explained that the concept of national laboratories traces back to the Manhattan Project, where the U.S. government collaborated with scientists to develop atomic weapons that secured victory in World War II for the United States and its allies.
He suggested that Trump’s recent announcement of “Project Stargate,” a half-trillion-dollar initiative to advance AI, could be expanded to include additional public-private partnerships modeled after the Manhattan Project. Such efforts, he said, would position the U.S. ahead of its adversaries in the race for AI dominance, Breitbart noted.
“You saw this initiative the president discussed—Project Stargate—which is the four-year, $500 billion AI infrastructure project that’s been proposed with all of our great technology companies,” Ratcliffe said. “We could expand on that with a public-private partnership where a government element could participate, and we’ve done this before—our constellation of national laboratories can be traced back to the Manhattan Project, which we used as a public-private partnership to develop the first nuclear weapon to win World War II.
“We need to be thinking about the ways we can do that to counter how our adversaries are using things like the cyber threats to their strategic advantage and putting our national security interests in a place where we’re able to harness the data and computational speed of AI to understand trends and events and threats and opportunities faster than our adversaries do,” he continued.
Ratcliffe characterized AI as both a “huge opportunity” and a “threat.” He emphasized that business leaders in the emerging technology sector, such as Elon Musk of SpaceX—who also owns X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and leads Trump’s newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—are essential in ensuring that the United States remains at the forefront of global AI advancements.
“What we know is our adversaries are currently trying to utilize AI and machine learning and the emerging technologies in that space to collect intelligence against us and to use that against American interests,” Ratcliffe said. “So the bottom line is we have to harness it and utilize it more effectively than our adversaries.
“I’m confident in our ability to do this. If you watched my confirmation, I talked about the fact that only one country in the world can parallel park a 200-foot rocket booster,” he continued. “The Chinese can’t do it, the Russians can’t do it, and the United States can’t do it without partnerships like we have with SpaceX and Elon Musk taking advantage of American innovation and ingenuity and the ability to do that.
“What I want to do as CIA director is find creative ways to partner with the private sector to take advantage of that American innovation and ingenuity without sacrificing our security and without losing our ability to protect our sources and methods. So to expand on that, and there’s a number of ways I think we can do that,” he told the outlet.
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