How can we capture complex human judgement to make better decisions supported by AI?
The UK Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, seeks innovative solutions to enhance how human judgment in national security decision-making can be captured and supported by AI. This challenge invites industry and academia to develop frameworks or technologies that can effectively capture decision-making processes while ensuring transparency, explainability, and adherence to legal and ethical standards.
Opportunity
Challenge opens
08/01/2025
Challenge closes
07/02/2025
Benefit
The UK Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, is keen to hear from a range of sole traders, small and medium-size businesses (start-ups, SMEs) and academia.
Context
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, works overseas to help make the UK a safer and more prosperous place. For over 100 years, SIS has ensured the UK and our allies keep one step ahead of our adversaries. We have three core aims: stopping terrorism, disrupting the activity of hostile states, and giving the UK a cyber advantage.
The threats the UK faces are broad and growing in number: the Director General of MI5 said in a recent public statement that the UK was facing ‘the most complex and interconnected threat environment we’ve ever seen’. Alongside this increase in threat, the data that SIS and our partners need to harness is also increasing in size and complexity.
Our people use data and technology to make high-stakes decisions daily to identify and mitigate threats to UK national security. These are finely balanced decisions based on assessment of risk and the probability of threat. We will always rely on nuanced human judgement to make sense of complex and often sparse information, to make these difficult decisions. We believe that by embracing new technology, we can support our people in making these judgements.
Embracing technology has always been critical to our work in keeping the country safe. Whilst human judgement will always be at the heart of our work, investing in tools and technology that allow our people to continue to make the best decisions, in a complex world, is key.
It is within this context that we constantly strive to ensure we are as good as we can be at making decisions in an increasingly complex and interconnected landscape. Like many other sectors, we are exploring how AI can make our officers’ judgements, including how to prioritise our finite resource, even better.
We are already making use of AI lawfully, proportionately and ethically to responsibly support our people in their critical work to detect national security threats; we must give specific attention to ensuring our use of AI is anchored in the principles of fairness, necessity and proportionality and meet our strict legal and ethical standards.
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