The FBI is using artificial intelligence to sift through thousands of daily tips and identify the most imminent threats, reducing the time from tip to field action from weeks down to hours or even minutes. Deputy Director Christopher Raia told CBS News on Thursday that the technology has helped the bureau act faster on credible threats as violent crime rates around the country hit a 20-year low.
"We've sprinkled in AI and now these tips rise to the top and we can get them out to the field to action," Raia said, a 23-year veteran of the FBI appointed deputy director in January.
Violent crime in the U.S. has dropped sharply. The murder rate reached a 20-year low in 2025, and violent crime overall posted the largest one-year decline on record, according to the FBI's annual crime report released in August. Aggravated assaults fell 7.2%, rapes declined 7.6%, and robbery dropped 18.5%.
Raia credited a "combination of things" for the downturn, praising state and local law enforcement, tighter border security, and a "renewed focus on violent crime."
How AI sorts the threat pile
The FBI's National Threat Operations Center handles hundreds or thousands of tips flowing in daily from around the world. Before AI, the volume outstripped what human analysts could process quickly. "The FBI and other agencies were sitting on a bunch of risk," Raia said. "We didn't have the manpower to analyze it."
Now algorithms help flag the most urgent threats so agents can act. In one case, Zachary Charles Newell of Newport, North Carolina, posted online threats to "shoot up a black preschool" and harm children. AI bumped the tip to the top of the queue, and an arrest followed swiftly. Newell was sentenced in March to two years in federal prison. Without the technology, Raia said, it might have taken days or weeks for the bureau to get on the case.
For government and public safety agencies handling high volumes of intelligence, this kind of triage is a core AI for Government application. The same pattern recognition and prioritization logic applies across AI for IT & Development workflows where teams manage large data streams and need to separate signal from noise.
Oversight and privacy questions
Asked about civil liberties concerns, Raia said the bureau has been transparent with Congress and oversight boards. "Somebody has to police the police, right?" he said. The FBI has sent at least 50,000 pages of documents for review in the past 18 months. "We are not taking away the privacies or the civil liberties of Americans, whether it's AI or any of the other responsibilities that we have as an agency," he said.
Privacy advocates have also raised questions about Flock Safety, a company that supplies automated license plate readers to 6,000 law enforcement agencies and shares data with federal authorities. Raia defended the technology: "As far as the Flock cameras go, those are vital in our investigations as far as leads and as far as finding folks."
Task force targets cartels and gangs
Raia also pointed to the Trump administration's Homeland Security Task Force, created by executive order in January 2025, as a driver of better interagency coordination. The task force brings together the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Defense.
In August, 81 alleged members of a violent gang in Puerto Rico were charged with drug trafficking and firearms violations under the task force initiative.
Why this matters for government and IT professionals
The FBI's approach shows a practical model for AI adoption in risk-heavy environments: use algorithms for triage, not final decisions. The system flags what needs human attention faster, but agents still make the judgment calls. For IT leaders and government analysts, the takeaway is that AI can shrink response times from weeks to hours without removing human oversight - provided the data pipeline and review processes are built to handle it. The 50,000 pages of documentation shared with oversight bodies also signal the compliance burden that comes with deploying AI in regulated public-sector work.
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