A new signal indicating purely AI-generated intelligence is here
In our fireside chat, Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, Director of National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, unveils the new template.

On Tuesday, I sat down with Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. We were speaking in front of thousands at D.C.’s convention center, as part of the Special Competitive Studies Project’s conference on artificial intelligence.
One of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s main responsibilities is to baseline the earth in the hunt for threats and anomalies, providing geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). The agency uniquely sits on a staggering amount of data from satellites, drones, and reconnaissance aircraft.
My conversation with Adm. Whitworth hinged on Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative that launched in 2017. It uses computer vision algorithms to identify military targets, looking at full motion video feeds, satellite images, as well as the invisible, including radio waves and infrared. These algorithms are meant to speed up decisions and scale up to process increasing terabytes of data.
Maven’s ambitions come amid two truths: Adversaries will try to hide their deepest secrets across the globe. And the stakes are incredibly high when it comes to mistakes in military operations.
To be clear, humans are still essential, training to the AI to decipher… is that a weapons depot or is it a hospital? It’s called labeling. Yet there are other complicating factors. Weather can limit visibility. An officer may not trust in the technology.
“I'll make a little news here,” Adm. Whitworth told me on stage. “We actually have now adopted a living, breathing template, a real piece of art that goes around every product, and it says these words, ‘Machine-generated GEOINT.’ And it actually has a matrix as to whether it was the dissemination that was machine-generated or [if] it was the exploitation of the image itself — no human hands actually participate in that particular template and that particular dissemination. That’s new. That’s new and different.”
NGA’s template marks the first time that an entity inside the intel community is signaling, “What you are looking at has not been touched by human hands,” the admiral said.
“It's important that those combatant commanders and the [Defense] Secretary and the President have that knowledge, so that they can assess and possibly ask additional questions,” the admiral went on to say. “That they know also the risk continuum that we’re all operating under.”
He described how the number of terabytes from space will rise over the next decade. “At least we're humble enough to admit that we’re going to need to have some humanless production, with very close caveats.” And he added that his agency is also producing a second product “that enumerates exactly where humans were involved in the coaching of the model and the level of oversight in that process.”
Project Maven has already been used in Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria. It has reportedly helped to target Houthis in Yemen and vessels in the Red Sea. And imagine how this new labeling system will come into play in the years and wars ahead, decision by decision.
Fascinating brief and direction GEOINT is inevitably traveling. Would love to see you cover AI use across the other INT disciplines. Will the IC stop trying to recruit agents/sources and instead build agentic-sources to penetrate foreign halls of power? I still strongly believe the "on the ground" reporting & human relationship aspect will persist, but definitely a brave new world the community finds itself. Thanks you for covering!