On June 10, 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard addressed the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit 2025. The transcript of her fireside chat is below.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard

Transcript of Fireside Chat

AWS Summit 2025

Washington, DC

June 10, 2025

Dave Levy: Our first guest, which I'm incredibly excited to join us, is keenly aware of the speed and scale and innovation that AWS provides for national security. She's gonna tell us more about how the broader defense and intelligence community uses cloud AI and Zero Trust to support their critical work. Please join me in welcoming the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

DNI Gabbard: Thank you. Thank you. So thank you.

Dave Levy: Okay. Well, you know, before I before I read this, I was reading it and I started to feel a little inadequate, so I'm gonna read it. Anyway, thank you so much for being here, Director Gabbard, we know you're incredibly busy. You and your teams are safeguarding us and everyone around the world. So I just wanna say thank you so much and it's really our privilege to have this time with you. So, thank you.

DNI Gabbard: Thank you, thank you for the invitation and great to see such a wonderful crowd here today.

Dave Levy: So you've, so I'm gonna try to not let comparison be the thief of joy for myself, but you've had such a remarkable trajectory. You were born in American Samoa, raised in Hawaii, you served in the Hawaii State Legislature, the Hawaii National Guard, the US Army Reserve, the US House of Representatives. You served in Iraq and Kuwait. I'm reading this list and I'm thinking the U.S.- the House is probably the toughest part of all of that.

DNI Gabbard: You're right.

Dave Levy: But now you're serving as the top intelligence official in the United States with the opportunity to really reinvigorate the role. Can you share with us about your journey? What have you learned? What continues to really drive you today?

DNI Gabbard: Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much again. And to, to sum it up in a short period of time, I, I'll just say that when I was 21 years old and I ran for, was elected to the state legislature in Hawaii, I did not at all ever think about, well, this is the first step towards a career in politics, or thinking that I would do this for the next 20 years. It was really centered around something that I'm grateful to my parents for instilling in us. I'm the fourth of five kids, was a deep sense of duty and service and a recognition on something I was glad to experience from a young age that I was happiest when I was doing things for others. And so, growing up as a teenager in Hawaii my desire, or my running for office at a young age really came from the fact that I saw problems that needed to be solved and leaders in positions of power to solve them who either were ignorant to the problems or saw them and chose to do nothing.

And that experience in, first of all, seeing the impact of what a person can do when you choose to take action to solve problems for the best interest of the people and in service to others what, what an incredible and, and humbling experience that is. And that's really been the guiding light for me throughout all of the things that I've had the opportunity to do in my life. Enlisting because of the terrorist attack on 9/11, volunteering to deploy to Iraq and, and always searching and chasing for those positions and opportunities for impact. And so as I served in Congress for eight years, representing Hawaii's second district we have two members of Congress. I, I was grateful to have the district that covered every island in the state except for urban Honolulu, downtown Honolulu. So when I'd fly back from here to Hawaii, usually every other weekend, much of my time was spent island hopping working to go and see everyone there.

But I served on the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees at the time, and, and again, I could not have, and it never crossed my mind that I would one day be the director of National Intelligence. And when I was nominated for this position, a lot of people questioned, what are your qualifications? You didn't come from an intelligence, intelligence background, but really my argument that I made to senators who, who were making the decision of whether or not to confirm me for this position has really proven to be very true. Now that I'm here, which is, I, I was a customer of intelligence products, both in the military deployed and here at home as well as as a member of Congress for eight years. And in both cases, experienced the value of it, the critical value of that timely, relevant, objective intelligence the mechanisms of delivery for the, for that intelligence so that it's applicable and operational, but also in a lot of ways experience frustration and disappointment with those intelligence products.

And it was interesting to see, you know, I left Congress in January of 2021 and going back now and speaking to many of my former colleagues in the house, many senators, and they still expressed a lot of the same frustrations that I felt that that, you know, much of what we were briefed on was, was already reported in a newspaper on cable TV news. And that even if it was quality reporting, it was coming too late for our decision makers and policy makers to actually operationalize that intelligence reporting. And so I'm grateful to be in a position where I've identified some problems and we're seeking to solve them.

Dave Levy: Alright, that's great. Thank you for your service. You were confirmed in February. So speaking of confirmation, yes. Got through that. You were confirmed in February.

DNI Gabbard: Yes. That was something.

Dave Levy: So over these past few months, four or five months, what have been some of the most pressing priorities for the intelligence community? What have you identified are the, the, the things that are most pressing for us?

DNI Gabbard: Yeah, I mean, really it's, it's about getting after our core mission. All of you here are familiar with bureaucracies and dealing with them, and unfortunately with bureaucracies, they're not inherently negative, but unfortunately processes get in the way of delivery of outcomes and, and solutions. And so really the, the primary focus of mine has been for not only the ODNI as an organization, but across the intelligence community, is making sure that we are solely focused on what our core mission is, which is to deliver that quality intelligence that's relevant, timely, and objective to those who need it, whether they be out in the field or those who are decision makers for most of which, of course is the president of the United States. Part and parcel with that, as we take a first principles approach in assessing my organization and the intelligence community elements is, is how do we, you know, modernize I think is a word that's overused, but how do we look at the available tools that exist largely in the private sector to make it so that our intelligence professionals, both collectors and analysts, are able to focus their time and energy on the things that only they can do.

And so this is where, you know a lot of the work that we're doing with AWS and other organizations really is searching for those tools that we know are available, that you guys spend a lot of time building and how we can, how we can best apply those to make sure that we are accomplishing our core mission. And then of course, focusing on, on what are the greatest threats that we face and how can we maximize our intelligence collection and analysis capabilities to have the best oversight and visibility again, to best inform our policy makers so we can ensure ultimately the safety, security and freedom of the American people.

Dave Levy: Yeah, that's great to hear. And you know, we've been one of those partners for many, many years, and we're committed to do it. We have teams and teams of people that are building and, and thinking about how to support that mission. And I just announced that we're launching a new secret west region by the end of the year to hopefully help with that innovation. How do you see the intelligence community deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning today?

DNI Gabbard: I think that we've made progress, but there there's so much room, there's so much room for growth and, and more application of, of AI and machine learning. As you know, there's been an intelligence community chat bot that's been deployed across the enterprise. Opening up and, and making it possible for us to use AI applications in the top secret clouds has been a game changer. Once again, looking across all of the IC elements, these are tools that are better helping us get after our mission. We've seen in some ways, in some of the intelligence community elements, but perhaps not others, how AI is being used you know, with hr with kind of basic systems that we need. And so what we're looking at is, is are they working, are there better tools? If we already have the right tools, we can save a lot of money If we are, if we in the ODNI are basically purchasing those tools that can be used across all the all 18 intelligence community elements.

So there, there's a lot of opportunity. A lot of this I think comes for some folks who've been working in the community for a long time, a change in culture and a change in maybe it, it's really about education. Sure. About what tools are available and how to re-look and rethink how we are doing things to increase those efficiencies and effectiveness. And I think that's, that's really one of the key things that I've been pushing our, our workforce to do is take a step back and re-look at these problem sets and ask the question that you might not have asked for a long time, which is, why are we doing it this way? Are there better ways to accomplish what we are trying to do and being really creative and open-minded in what solutions are available that we may not know about.

One of the things that we're doing that, again, it sounds very simple, these, these problems that, that are sometimes presented as very complex when we say, okay, let's just break it down and be very, very simple in how we're approaching them. One that we are doing right now is creating unclassified spaces in, in at LX. It's crazy that, you know, when we have people who need to go out and have a zoom call with someone, they gotta go sit in the car outside and, and take that call. There are rules in place that make it very difficult for people who are working in the private sector to come in and meet with our professionals and have robust conversations about exactly this, what solutions are you bringing to our work to make it so that we can better accomplish our mission? So we're making it harder for ourselves than we need to. And something as simple as creating unclassified spaces in our building is one of the ways we're trying to get after that.

Dave Levy: That's great. It sounds like that there are a lot of innovations or a lot of opportunities that are right for ai, and you're pushing the teams and the organizations to go find those to work better and faster and innovate, and that's just great to hear. So I understand you've put down some new structures in place to support that kind of innovation and support that kind of thinking. And that's the Director's Initiatives Group. So tell us more about that. Tell us why that's necessary and what you think the group's gonna drive, what you hope to drive, and how you think that'll all turn out.

DNI Gabbard: So I, I saw very quickly coming into this role how the deluge of day-to-day tasks and churn can quickly suck up all of the time in the day and not really leave space for focusing on what, where we wanna be tomorrow, where do we wanna be next year, how do we really get after innovation within the intelligence community. So I created the Director's Initiatives Group so that we have a, a basically a, a team of special teams that are focused on, on these projects, and that is what they're doing. They're focused on what we, in the military would call, they're the future ops team, the FuOps team. And then of course, we have others in the organization who are focusing on the day-to-day deliverables that, that we are required to bring forward. You know, a couple of examples of, of the application of, of AI and machine learning that we've already used in this director's initiative group has been around declassification.

We have released thousands, tens of thousands of documents related to the assassinations of JFK and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. And we have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously, which is to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages. So looking at classification and declassification you know, looking for things, for example, that might be sensitive for living family members to be made aware of. So we've been able to do this and, and, and actually procure more tools to be able to make that possible. I think the other example I'll mention is, is some of the tools that we've been able to use that allow us to aggregate through the open source enterprise a lot more now than, than we used to before. 10,000 hours of media content, for example, that normally would take eight people, 48 hours to comb through now takes one person one hour through the use of, of some of the AI tools that we have here.

So those are a few of many examples that, that this Director's Initiatives Group is focused on. Again, not only for ODNI, but really for us to be able to provide these efficiencies and these tools across the entire enterprise and to support those unique and specific tools for entities like NGA and NRO and the geo and space that, that are, that are phenomenal. And again, operationalizing intelligence so that we don't collect intelligence just to have it, but to make sure it is applicable and usable and operational both for, for all of our customers.

Dave Levy: That's fantastic. Okay. One last question while we have you. While we, we were able to grab this time with you, what feedback or thoughts or anything for industry as we are engaging with with the broader IC, with ODNI, what feedback or thoughts do you have for us on, on how we should be engaging and what we should be thinking about as particularly in this new era of, of AI and machine learning and infrastructure at scale?

DNI Gabbard: Yeah. First I, I wanna just recognize your focus and your opening remarks on kind of the origins of Washington DC. And what that, what that actually means though. And, and it's something that I keep at the forefront of my mind, is our founding documents. You know, next year is the 250th anniversary of our country. And it's a good time for all of us, whether you work in governments or not, to really reflect on the power of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. And for us, you know, those documents being the North Star in the work that we do, especially around intelligence collection to make sure that we are operating within the, the confines of what the Constitution empowers us to do, but also being inspired by the ingenuity that our founding fathers had. When you go back and look, the majority of them were under the age of 30.

Dave Levy: I'm jealous. But yes.

DNI Gabbard: And that's where, you know, when we look at some of the limitations that we may placed on ourselves, it's really inspiring to go back and look at those who founded this country, how great, you know, how they were great visionaries that laid down the pathway for us to be here. And, and so as we go forward, I think I, I just encourage you to continue looking at opportunities for us to build these partnerships and recognize, at least under my leadership I wanna get us away from having the government trying to build tech solutions for itself. 'cause It's really not what the government is best at doing but really focusing on buying and purchasing solutions wherever we can so that the gov so that our workforce can really focus on the things that we are very good at and have exclusive responsibilities to fulfill.

Dave Levy: Well, it's a compelling vision. We're excited about the future and I know we are at AWS committed to help supporting that. And we're proud, we're a proud partner of the National Security and Defense Community. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here today and taking the time to speak with us Director Gabbard.

DNI Gabbard: Thanks for having me. Thank you everybody.

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