FBI director Kash Patel says AI use at bureau increased 605%

FBI Director Kash Patel just stated in an interview that he's responsible for a "605% increase" in the bureau's usage of AI. The problem is that while the pattern-recognition abilities of AI models make them an ideal candidate for use in law enforcement agencies, and It's a reasonable expectation that entities like the FBI would leverage the technology, it's hard to pin down what the 605% figure refers to.

The statement came up in an interview on Fox News, where Patel also said that AI, "when used lawfully, is a critical tool to triage data," remarking that the technology can be invaluable to assist in protecting children from school shootings. He credits AI as being instrumental in following up a lead to stop a shooting in North Carolina and "a half dozen other states" since his swearing-in.

It's hard to tell what Patel's seven-fold increase in AI could be referring to, as there appears to be little hard data about how much, and in what ways, AI is integrated into the bureau. Yet, there are a few leads that may help corroborate his claim.

The most recent details come from a February 2026 report about the DOJ's AI use case inventory in 2025, showing 50 of those attributed to the FBI, with nine marked as "high-impact." However, a more recent statement by the agency's Chief AI Officer Katie Noyes, in August, pinned approved use cases at 139, or close to three times the January amount.

Last year, the U.S. General Services Administration approved Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT as approved products, making them available to government agencies. Earlier this year in May, the Pentagon struck eight deals with AI companies as well. A few months ago, the FBI posted a procurement document asking for vendor proposals for $88 million's worth of AI servers, seemingly indicating that the agency is looking to expand its services.

But that may well be changing, as just a few days ago, on September 15, Patel claimed during a Senate hearing that he can directly contact major AI player's CEO, noting that "every single one of them has complied with our request and worked with us on law enforcement matters." Perhaps most importantly, he said that having access to vendors' models would make it easier to crack down on AI-assisted crime, seeing as criminal enterprises are rolling their own models, helped by distillation attacks.

The FBI now classifies AI-related crimes with its own descriptor, too, and highlights investment, romance, and employment as common areas of malfeasant activity in its latest Internet Crime Report. And in an op-ed published last May, Patel attributed a 30% increase in missing child locations and a 20% rise in child abuse arrests to the use of artificial intelligence tools, including facial recognition.

He also wrote that the "FBI now uses new AI tools to generate call transcriptions, provide concise synopses and even help correlate contacts with other received complaints," highlighting that messages collected under a search warrant can take weeks to be processed by a cadre of analysts, something that AI can do with ease.

All told, these developments do seem to indicate that the bureau is indeed leveraging AI tools, even if Patel's "605%" figure needs a basis for comparison.

Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.