Democrats Should Take a Look at John Ratcliffe’s AI Gigs

CIA director nominee John Ratcliffe has drawn objections over his role in declassifying intelligence that could have helped Donald Trump during the 2020 election, and for slow-walking the release of a report on the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

What has gone overlooked as Ratcliffe speeds toward a Thursday confirmation vote, however, are his ties to the artificial intelligence industry that is angling to pick up billions of dollars in government contracts during the Trump presidency.

Ratcliffe’s financial disclosures reveal that in just a few short years since his tour of duty in the first Trump cabinet, he amassed thousands of shares in artificial intelligence companies by serving on their advisory boards. Those gigs were among a host of potential conflicts of interest that also included an oil and gas firm, venture capital companies, and a private equity firm.

Democrats have not made noise about Ratcliffe’s tour through the revolving door. One progressive critic said that may be explained by the fact that former intelligence community leaders under Democratic presidents have had similar résumés — but that shouldn’t mean Ratcliffe gets a free pass.

“It’s unfortunately bog-standard corruption, which is part of why his nomination is so uncontroversial,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project. “It’s not right, but it is standard.”

As is customary for government officials, Ratcliffe has vowed to avoid “any actual or apparent conflict of interest,” by selling stocks and recusing himself from any matter in which he had a personal stake. For Hauser, however, that does not erase the risk that his ties to the industry will affect his judgment on a technology that many critics say has yet to prove its usefulness.

Ratcliffe and the Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment.

A Gig Machine

Ratcliffe was a former Justice Department prosecutor and small-town mayor when he ran to represent a congressional district outside Dallas in 2014, besting a 91-year-old World War II veteran as a tea party challenger in their primary.

Trump first tried to tap him as director of national intelligence in 2019, calling off the nomination under protests that Ratcliffe was too inexperienced, before putting him forth again the next year under less opposition. As DNI, Ratcliffe was criticized for releasing a report on Russian intelligence during the waning days of the 2020 presidential election that seemed tailor-made to help Trump win.

His resume for his first confirmation process listed only a handful of prior positions outside government. The documents that Ratcliffe filed with the Office of Government Ethics last month, however, paint a picture of a man who has held a dizzying array of gigs since then.

Among a smorgasbord of consultantships, fellowships, and advisory roles, Ratcliffe itemized $2.2 million in income since 2021, when he left the government.

He took home $180,000 as the co-chair of the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute, which served as a haven for Trump officials in waiting during the Biden presidency, and another $80,000 as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025.

In six months alone last year, he earned $80,000 in consulting fees from Blackstone, a massive private equity company whose CEO backs Trump, along with another $15,000 to $50,000 in bills the company still owed him as of his December 18 filing.

He also banked $500,000 in consulting fees from oil and gas pipeline company U.S. Trinity Energy Services, and a $25,000 honorarium from the Gatestone Institute, an anti-Muslim think tank.

The AI Goldmine

The industry that could overlap most with Ratcliffe’s portfolio as CIA director, however, is artificial intelligence. Ratcliffe’s disclosure listed a trio of artificial intelligence companies that have already received defense contracts.

As the CIA director, Ratcliffe would direct a vast and classified “black budget” for an agency that often relies on contractors to perform essential functions. The agency is increasingly seeking to build up its AI capabilities, from a chatbot designed to simulate world leaders to a cloud computing contract potentially worth tens of billions of dollars.

For advisory work starting as early as March 2021 and lasting until his nomination, Ratcliffe said he received stock options for serving on the advisory boards of Silicon Valley company Latent AI, Los Angeles-based Arctop Inc., and Dallas defense tech company Shield AI.

Latent AI makes software that it says can help the Navy speed up underwater threat detection.

In an interview with the Intercept, Latent AI CEO Jags Kandasamy praised Ratcliffe’s work as an adviser to the company and said he would do well at the CIA. During his stint with Latent AI, Ratcliffe was not involved in interacting directly with Congress or the executive branch, instead providing big-picture advice on strategic priorities, according to the CEO.

“We were approached by several foreign governments and stuff, and I always ran that by John to ensure that we are, from a policy point of view, we are staying on the right side,” Kandasamy said.

Kandasamy said his company has not sought contracts with the CIA, but he declined to comment on whether it has sought to work with other parts of the intelligence community.

Arctop, which describes itself as a “cognition company,” won a military contract in September to decode in real time the brain activity of Air Force cadets going through training simulations. Shield AI is developing a product called Hivemind, which it claims will “enable swarms of drones and aircraft to operate autonomously without GPS, communications, or a pilot.” The company won a contract worth up to $60 million from the Air Force in 2022, according to a report. Neither of those companies responded to requests for comment.

In a January 14 letter to a CIA ethics official, Ratcliffe said he would sell any remaining stock he had in the artificial intelligence companies and promised not to make any decisions that could affect them unless he obtained a written ethics waiver.

Still, Hauser said Ratcliffe’s AI portfolio raises concerns about the nominee’s potential to wield influence over CIA contracting decisions.

“The more you’re tied into artificial intelligence companies, the more you might become bullish on AI’s applicability than a more neutral figure might be,” Hauser said. “If you’re an AI company and you can tell people, ‘I have a CIA contract,’ I think that’s pretty good marketing. I think it’s just incredibly valuable, these contracts, both for direct cash and for legitimizing functions.”