Artificial intelligence is becoming a larger part of federal law enforcement operations, and FBI Director Kash Patel says the agency is using the technology to help locate missing children, identify suspects, and respond to threats more quickly.

In an opinion piece published Monday on the Fox News website, Patel wrote that the FBI launched a broad modernization effort after he and then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino took leadership roles at the bureau.

“When I was first sworn in as ninth director of the FBI, one of my top priorities was to modernize the bureau with new, cutting-edge technology that would allow us to better serve and protect the American people,” Patel wrote.

According to Patel, when he arrived, “the FBI was running on archaic patchwork systems without AI, effectively putting a 2025 car battery into a vehicle from 1985.” He said it was like a Commodore 64 when the agency needed to be a supercomputer.

Patel said the FBI created an AI working group, appointed a chief AI officer, launched an AI review board, and teamed with private-sector companies to modernize internal systems and investigative tools.

“Artificial intelligence is a huge part of that overhaul. When then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino and I arrived here at headquarters, AI had almost zero role at the FBI,” Patel wrote. “That had to change, so we got to work.”

Now, Patel said the FBI uses AI tools at its National Threat Operations Center to transcribe incoming calls, summarize threats, compare tips against existing cases, and rank leads by severity—a process he claimed recently helped agents stop a planned mass shooting at a North Carolina preschool.

“Last year alone, the FBI identified and located 6,300 missing kids, a 30% increase, and arrested 2,000 abusers, a 20% increase—largely thanks to these improvements,” he wrote.

“In a recent FBI Richmond case, the FBI’s Child Exploitation Operational Unit used facial recognition tools to save 8- and 12-year-old children from a would-be abuser, who will now spend 50 years in prison,” he added, further noting that the FBI used AI to process more than 75 terabytes of material collected after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.

Patel's article comes as federal agencies have increasingly adopted AI tools for intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, immigration operations, document review, and surveillance. In March, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that it had signed deals with Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, and SpaceX to incorporate their AI technology.

The FBI’s AI expansion has drawn criticism from civil liberties groups and privacy advocates, who warn that facial recognition systems and automated threat assessment tools can introduce bias, generate false matches, and expand government surveillance powers.

“Now that we have AI, that idea of limitation is completely out the window,” Naomi Brockwell, founder of the privacy advocacy group Ludlow Institute, told Decrypt. “AI can sort people, rank them, adjust credit scores, and use all of this data to paint intimate profiles and preemptively conduct law enforcement.”

In April, Reps. Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert introduced a bill that would require warrants for federal agencies to access Americans’ digital data, using AI-assisted surveillance tools.

Despite concerns about AI-driven surveillance or the technology replacing human agents, Patel argued the FBI cannot afford to fall behind in adopting cutting-edge tools.

“We are not replacing humans; we’re supplementing them, sharpening their focus and expediting the pace of our investigations,” he said. “Collecting data to sit in storage is like keeping Babe Ruth on the bench permanently.”