CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Breitbart News last week that President Donald Trump's administration is considering creating a national laboratory akin to the Manhattan Project to help develop and steer the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

"When you talk about AI, one of the things I want to explore is whether we can expand and establish a national laboratory for the development of AI to help the U.S. government leverage emerging technology to make sure American leadership is that," Ratcliffe told Breitbart News in his first interview as CIA director last week. He was confirmed last week by the U.S. Senate into the position and spoke exclusively with Breitbart News about how he intends to, as directed by Trump, remove politics from the world's most preeminent intelligence service and restore it to its critical functions of intelligence-gathering and preparing the U.S. government with the best possible information. Ratcliffe also told Breitbart News that he would be pushing to formally determine if COVID leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, something he has since done as director of the CIA.

Ratcliffe explained the idea for national laboratories dates back to the Manhattan Project, where the U.S. government helped scientists develop nuclear weapons that won World War II for the United States and allied nations. He said the recent announcement from Trump of "Project Stargate," the half-trillion-dollar initiative to promote AI, could be expanded upon to include more public-private partnerships akin to the Manhattan Project that get the U.S. out in front of the nation's adversaries on AI.

"You saw this initiative the president discussed—Project Stargate—which is the four-year, $500 billion AI infrastructure project that's been proposed with all of our great technology companies," Ratcliffe said. "We could expand on that with a public-private partnership where a government element could participate, and we've done this before—our constellation of national laboratories can be traced back to the Manhattan Project, which we used as a public-private partnership to develop the first nuclear weapon to win World War II. We need to be thinking about the ways we can do that to counter how our adversaries are using things like the cyber threats to their strategic advantage and putting our national security interests in a place where we're able to harness the data and computational speed of AI to understand trends and events and threats and opportunities faster than our adversaries do."