Intelligence Agency Using AI to Combat Opioids

An external intelligence service of the federal government is using artificial intelligence to combat the opioid epidemic.

The program, called SABLE SPEAR, scans millions of websites, images and other open-source material to map the drug marketplace for fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.

Brian Drake, Defense Intelligence Agency’s director of artificial intelligence for future capabilities and innovations, spoke about the program during an appearance at the annual DODIIS conference in Tampa, Fla.

“We…extract things like emails, phone numbers, physical addresses, business records. From that information, we then correlate that against those [satellite] images and then say, 'Yep, that’s a place on the planet that produces fentanyl. We know that because open sources tell us that that place exists,’” he said.

Opioid use has reached crisis proportions in the United States, as prescription opioid painkillers have become much more common. In the United States, nearly 400,000 people have died of overdoses between 1999 and 2017.

Drake says SABLE could work since drug traffickers want to be found by customers.

“If you’re a business that’s trying to sell a pharmaceutical good, a quite lucrative one by the way, then I want to be found. I want to sell it. I want to make that happen. If I’m doing it illegally, I don’t want to be found at all. And I’m going to ingest denial and deception into any dataset where that might be.”

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