AWS signs deal with British spy agencies to boost use of AI for espionage

The UK’s three spy agencies have contracted Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm, to host classified material in a deal aimed at boosting the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage.

Britain’s GCHQ spy agency championed the procurement of a high-security cloud system and it will be used by sister services MI5 and MI6, as well as other government departments such as the Ministry of Defence during joint operations, the report added.

The agreement was signed this year with AWS, Amazon.com Inc’s cloud service unit, and the data of all the agencies will be held in Britain, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the discussions.

The contract is likely to ignite concerns over sovereignty given that a vast amount of the UK’s most secret data will be hosted by a single US tech company. The agreement, estimated by industry experts to be worth £500m to £1bn over the next decade, was signed this year, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

However, the details are closely guarded and were not intended to be made public. Although AWS is a US company, all the agencies’ data will be held in Britain, according to those with knowledge of the deal. Amazon will not have any access to information held on the cloud platform, those people said.

In February, Britain’s cyber spies at the GCHQ eavesdropping agency said they had fully embraced artificial intelligence to uncover patterns in vast amounts of global data to counter hostile disinformation and snare child abusers. GCHQ has been using basic forms of AI such as translation technology for years but is now stepping up its use, partly in response to the use of AI by hostile states and partly due to the data explosion that makes it effective.

Jeremy Fleming, GCHQ director, has previously said that making use of AI will be “at the heart” of his agency’s transformation to keep the country safe as spying moves into a digital age.

The new cloud service — designed to host top-secret information securely — will enable spies to share data more easily from field locations overseas and power specialist applications such as speech recognition which can “spot” and translate particular voices from hours’ worth of intercept recordings. It will also allow GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 to conduct faster searches on each other’s databases.

While the agreement is a first of its kind for the UK, Britain’s security apparatus is lagging behind its US peers in use of commercial cloud services. The CIA signed its first $600m cloud contract with AWS in 2013, on behalf of all the US intelligence agencies. This cloud provision was upgraded last year under a new deal with a consortium comprising AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM.

The French government this year backed the creation of a new “sovereign cloud” which will be used by the country’s public sector to handle sensitive data using government-approved security methods. Dubbed Bleu, it is expected to join the Gaia-X project, which aims to foster a European cloud industry capable of competing with US companies such as Google and AWS.