The FBI's AI Gamble: Faster Threats, but Who's Watching the Watchers?

The FBI's deputy director Christopher Raia has a compelling story: AI is making us safer. An algorithm spots a tip about threats to a Black preschool. It rises to the top of the pile. An arrest happens in hours instead of days. Murder rates hit a 20-year low. Violent crime drops by record margins. The math looks clean.

But the story has a second half, and it's the one that matters for the Common Good.

Speed Without Guardrails

Raia is honest about the problem his AI solves: the FBI gets hundreds or thousands of tips a day from around the world. Human analysts can't keep up. So the bureau is building systems to sort them automatically, flagging the most urgent cases for human action. That's sensible.

What's not sensible is that America is doing this with no federal AI law.

The EU passed its AI Act in 2024. It sets rules about what AI can do, who's liable when it fails, and how to audit it for bias and rights violations. The U.S.? Nothing. Six companies control 90% of frontier AI development. The FBI can move faster than Congress can think. And when Raia talks about "transparency with Congress," he means 50,000 pages of documents in a year and a half, documents that oversight boards see, but the public doesn't.

Sixty-three percent of Americans say AI needs more regulation. They're right.

The Surveillance Creep We Don't Talk About

Buried in the story is something more troubling: the FBI is also defending automated license plate readers, tools made by companies like Flock Safety that supply 6,000 law enforcement agencies around the country. That data gets shared with federal agencies. Raia calls them "vital" for investigations. He's probably right about that too.

But vital for whom? A tool designed to find bad guys can also track protesters, follow immigrants, monitor who visits clinics or mosques or union halls. The same algorithm that catches a threat can chill a right.

Raia says "somebody has to police the police." He's right again. But right now, that somebody is Congress, and Congress isn't writing laws. The FBI is writing policy by using tools that exist because no one stopped them.

What This Means for Workers

Here's the part that connects to your wallet: the future of work is AI. Thirty percent of hours worked could be automated by 2030. Only 24% of displaced workers get any retraining. Denmark spends 2% of GDP on active labor market policies to help people move to new jobs. The U.S. spends 0.1%.

The FBI is getting smarter tools. Which is good. But America is not getting smarter about what happens when AI does the work humans used to do, whether that's crime analysis or data entry or customer service. We're moving fast. We're not moving together.

Read the full story at CBS News.