Lunch With A Spy

What I learned about espionage in the age of AI at Paris’s Cercle de l’Union Interalliée

“I was what those in the intelligence community call a case officer,” he said.

The man stood behind a podium in one of those grand Paris rooms built for the diplomatic aristocracy of another era. The ceiling was high, the gilt moldings of the Louis XVI style framing the room. Out the large open window, the Eiffel Tower shone in the midday sun of April. The room was hot, and I was beginning to sweat.

Around the man sat a crowd of American expatriates. Men in dark suits, polished shoes, and well-knotted ties. And women whose clothes hinted of Chanel and Dior without making it obvious. The room had the polite stillness of people who knew they had been admitted somewhere difficult to enter.

Most people, the man said, still think of James Bond and Jason Bourne. A chalk mark on a pavement. A meeting arranged in a street. A source handled carefully in some unfriendly quarter of the world. But the old romance of espionage had been overtaken by something colder. An entity that can think faster than any human, manipulate you like a spy, and learn the inner workings of your mind.

Anthony Vinci, co-founder and CEO of Vico, an AI company built to forecast geopolitical events, spoke without hesitation. He looked to be in his mid-40s, though he had the guarded look of a man who all too often must keep secrets.

Over the course of his career, Vinci conducted intelligence work in Iraq, Africa, and Asia. During that time, he developed an interest in the emerging field of artificial intelligence—and how it might reshape the way intelligence itself is produced.

In 2018, he became the Chief Technology Officer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the arm of U.S. intelligence that turns satellite images into strategic advantage. There, he was tasked with something more ambitious than oversight. He helped push artificial intelligence into the core of the system, reshaping how intelligence is gathered, interpreted, and delivered in a world moving faster than human analysis alone could keep up.

In the intelligence community, he represents a shift from old espionage to predictive intelligence. Not trench coats and dead drops, but satellites, AI models, data streams, forecasting systems, and citizens becoming targets in the intelligence battlefield.

He believes that in the past, only case officers (code word for field agent) needed to know spycraft and counterintelligence tactics to protect themselves from threats, and that time is long gone. We all need to know this now, for our own protection.

Now, authoritarian governments like Russia and China are developing their own AI systems, some of which are targeted at slowly changing the political opinions of those in the West. Russia is now using AI to pump out hundreds of thousands of fake articles, not to be read by you and me, but by ChatGPT. These articles, as he explained, are put right where chatbots go to look for the information they tell you.

“Everyone says they wouldn’t fall for propaganda like that, but I don’t know… Over the course of years, it subtly pushes in one direction without you even noticing. All of a sudden, over the course of 3 or 4 years, China has ever so subtly convinced you that Taiwan isn’t really worth defending, were China to invade.”

As I sat at my table, suit and tie, staring at my chicken, I suddenly wasn’t as hungry. As a power user of ChatGPT, I found myself wondering if I had been influenced by anything it had said politically. I don’t think I have, but now I will keep an even closer watch, I thought.

The room was one of the most elegant dining rooms I have had the pleasure of eating in since I moved to Paris one year prior. The 18th-century hôtel particulier, adorned in Louis XVI and Neoclassical detail, communicated power and refinement effortlessly.

The house itself, where this meeting—hosted by the American Club of Paris—was taking place, became the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée in 1917, at the height of the First World War, when it served as a meeting place for Allied officers and diplomats.

L’Interalliée, as it is called, is one of the most exclusive and private clubs in Paris. Touting a membership of the city’s elite, it sits in the heart of the 8th arrondissement.

Today I sat, jet-lagged, fighting the lingering effects of a cold, and a 7-hour flight from the U.S. the day prior, straining to listen to Anthony talk, with plugged-up ears that refused to pop after the plane descended from 35,000 feet over the English Channel.

Alas, the microphone prevailed as Anthony began in on how to protect yourself against the coming threat of AI, this incredible tool we all will benefit from, in the wrong hands.

He explains you have to take what you see with a healthy dose of skepticism, and his life in the intelligence community taught him the practice of verifying information from multiple sources.

The meal finished up, and after having a word or two with the impressive and obviously intelligent CEO and congratulating him on his book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America, which I am reading now, I made my way to the window and ordered a glass of champagne.

I may not be a spy myself, but I do feel like James Bond in a place like this, overlooking a massive garden in the heart of Paris, blooming with spring. The waiters below began setting up for an event in the same garden that had hosted such gatherings for over 200 years.

To the right, the Eiffel Tower showed just above the trees, and it brought me back to something the president of the American Club of Paris said before the talk.

We are brought here, to France, as Americans, by our shared values of liberty and freedom. Those values are now under threat.

My thoughts on what ChatGPT may have unknowingly convinced me of returned.

I quietly finished my drink and kept my thoughts to myself.