The intelligence community has always done things the same way: Identify a potential source (a target); make a recruitment (an agent); train, brief, and run the agent in place to collect intelligence of value to decision makers.

A great agent gives the decision maker insight into intent, and a reasoning and decision advantage over his or her adversaries. In some circumstances, this advantage shapes destiny. Control over destiny is commonly called sovereignty.

AI has rapidly made reasoning ubiquitous; a commodity accessible to all at ever-decreasing marginal cost. In the age of AI, advantage accrues to those who use reason most effectively, make good decisions most quickly, and take actions most confidently. And who will do the bulk of this reasoning, make these decisions, and take these actions? Agents.

Agent Running in the Age of AI

Historically, agents were sources of intelligence but, in the age of AI, the new consumer of intelligence is an agent. Agents will be dependent on the quality and timeliness of the intelligence they receive to give them context, shape their priorities, drive their behavior, and ensure the quality of their actions. Every agent will need an intelligence layer it can trust. Recorded Future is that layer.

Recruiting and running human agents is hard and expensive, and very few have the resources and the expertise to do it well. One experienced MI6 officer might run a handful of agents at any one time. But the human-to-agent ratio is about to change dramatically as decision-making shifts from carbon to silicon, driving down the costs of agent running, but dramatically increasing our reliance on agent decisions and actions.

The best military and political outcomes often result from the seamless integration of different sources and types of intelligence to produce a true understanding of the threat or the objective to be met, enabling good decision-making and decisive actions. The Cuban Missile Crisis combined geospatial, human, and signals intelligence; the D-Day Landings combined signals, human, and meteorological intelligence. As frontier AI capabilities diffuse, and as agentic systems incorporate these capabilities into multi-agent workflows, the performance of these systems relative to others, and thus their ability to deliver advantage, will be determined by ongoing access to high-fidelity, multi-source intelligence.

This is already the case in the domain of cyber security. Intelligence-enriched systems and workflows learn more quickly, adapt more nimbly, and operate more efficiently and effectively than those they are competing with. The adoption rate of Recorded Future’s AI triage capabilities proves this hands down.

As former CIA Director Bill Burns put it, “The foundation for good policy choices is good intelligence wisely used.” In the age of AI, agents will make those choices, and the value of good intelligence will be greater than ever.

Intelligence platforms like Recorded Future, which shed light on threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in real time, and which scale with AI and agent capabilities, are the foundation for effective agentic systems. Intelligence-driven agent running will ensure better agentic decisions and actions, delivering an enduring advantage over adversaries.