The Pentagon wants $30 million to build an AI-powered lie detector — SkimNews
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- The Pentagon is requesting $30.3 million over five years for Polygraph+, an AI-enhanced lie detector that uses "standoff sensing" to capture physiological readings without attaching devices to subjects.
- Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) would run the program for federal employee vetting and "insider threat detection," per budget documents first reported by Inside Defense that have not yet been approved by Congress.
- The request lands as the Pentagon under Pete Hegseth has intensified polygraph use against suspected leakers; the New York Times reported in September that roughly 50 Joint Staff officers were tested after coverage of depleted US weapons stockpiles.
- Presage Technologies and Altec Research, selected by the Defense Innovation Unit in 2023 to build deception-detection prototypes, illustrate potential approaches — Presage uses cameras to measure heart and breathing rate, while Altec's prototype tracks head movement, facial skin temperature, and pore activity.
- Sophie van der Zee of Erasmus University notes that prior AI-deception projects — the UK's Silent Talker, the EU's iBorderCtrl, and the US border tool AVATAR — have all "quietly faded away" without producing reliable results.
- Kyri Kotsoglou of Northumbria University calls combining AI with polygraphs "the worst of both worlds," arguing there is no reliable ground truth to train on, since historical polygraph records may themselves be wrong.
- With the DOD employing 2.8 million people, even a polygraph claimed 80–94% accurate could falsely implicate tens of thousands, per the 2003 National Research Council finding that evidence for the technology's efficacy was "weak at best."
Why it matters: With 2.8 million DOD employees potentially subject to vetting by a system experts say combines two flawed methods, the $30.3 million program arrives as Pentagon polygraph use has escalated against suspected leakers — and every prior AI-deception project from Silent Talker to AVATAR has failed outside the lab.
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