CIA restructures tech, acquisition offices for the age of AI

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth monitor U.S. military operations in Venezuela, from Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday, January 3, 2026. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)

By Billy Mitchell • Jul 01, 2026

The CIA has reorganized several of its key acquisition and tech directorates to better embrace emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing as they reshape “the reality of conflict and asymmetric warfare,” Director John Ratcliffe said Tuesday.

During rare public remarks at the AWS DC Summit, Ratcliffe pointed to recent CIA-supported operations in Venezuela and the Middle East, including the rescue of a downed F-15E Strike Eagle pilot in Iran, as examples of the outsized impact of technology on the agency’s intelligence operations.

“It was a search that rested on our innovation, creativity, and our technological know-how, and ultimately it was a technology-enabled search that only the CIA could successfully and did successfully pull off,” the director said of the rescue effort, which he described as “the equivalent of trying to find a needle in a haystack.”