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FBI Director Kash Patel claims that the bureau has been able to stop school shootings because of A.I.
Speaking to Sean Hannity, Patel claimed that artificial intelligence was never used at the FBI until the second Trump administration. Now, he says, “I’m using it everywhere.”
“We stopped a school massacre in North Carolina because we got a tip and we were able to triage it with artificial intelligence,” he said on Tuesday’s episode of Hang Out with Sean Hannity.
Patel also claims that an unrelated school shooting in New York was stopped after receiving a tip from private-sector partners working on the bureau’s A.I. infrastructure.
open image in gallery FBI Director Kash Patel says that the implementation of artificial intelligence at the bureau has led to the prevention of some school shootings ( Hang Out with Sean Hannity/Fox News )
The FBI Director told the show’s eponymous host that artificial intelligence software was being used to help the bureau with the deluge of tips that it receives each week.
“If we had just humans look at it, we would never sift through them all,” Patel explained.
Later, he boasted that he involved private technology companies in the agency’s infrastructure.
“I’ve got every major tech company in the world embedded in the FBI, rebuilding our internet capabilities, our classified systems, and the ability for artificial intelligence to be in our counterterrorism program so we can get instantaneous results,” he said.
Patel added: “What’s the point of collecting terabytes of data if you can’t sift through it?”
open image in gallery Patel discussed the use of artificial intelligence with Sean Hannity ( Fox News/Hannity )
Now, artificial intelligence is being implemented in the bureau’s National Threat Operations Center.
Patel also says that the technology is allowing agents to “pop fingerprints immediately and get fugitives and arrest warrants out.”
During the interview, Patel also took a swipe at his predecessors’ handling of artificial intelligence at the bureau.
“The former FBI rejected that notion because they knew…that wasn’t their focus,” he said, referring to the implementation of A.I. “Their focus was on weaponization, not modernization.”
Patel has faced widespread criticism in recent months, and was recently lampooned in an SNL skit, which saw Aziz Ansari playing an exaggerated version of the FBI director.
In the sketch, he said an investigation conducted into the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25 “could not have been more thorough”.
“And for those of you saying I'm doing a bad job running the FBI, well, what if I told you this agency is only six weeks away from pinpointing the exact location of Osama bin Laden?” Ansari, still in character, quipped.