The FBI has begun using artificial intelligence (AI) under Director Kash Patel and has used it to stop multiple school shootings, Patel claimed on a podcast on Tuesday.

Speaking to American conservative television presenter Sean Hannity on the Hang Out with Sean Hannity podcast, Patel said that AI had never been used by the bureau before because the former FBI was focused on "weaponization, not modernization."

“What’s the point of collecting terabytes of data if you can’t sift through it?” he criticized.

Under his leadership, he claimed, the FBI had integrated AI into its National Threat Operations Center and the Criminal Justice Information Services database to, among other tasks, sift through the thousands of tips it receives every week.

“If we had just humans look at it, we would never sift through them all,” he argued. "We stopped a school massacre in North Carolina because we got a tip and we were able to triage it with artificial intelligence."

Patel also claimed that the FBI had received a tip from private-sector partners building their AI infrastructure, and had used that tip to prevent a school shooting in New York.

“I’ve got every major tech company embedded into the FBI," he said, "And the ability for artificial intelligence to be in our counterterrorism program so we can get instantaneous results.”

Among the functions Patel believes AI can assist with is its ability to "pop fingerprints immediately and get fugitives and arrest warrants out."

The official FBI website lists additional uses for AI, including "vehicle recognition, triage of voice samples for language identification, and generation of text from speech samples."

The site also claims that a trained investigator or analyst is responsible for assessing the output of the integrated AI systems, and that "a human being is ultimately accountable for the actions taken, not an AI."

"The FBI's policies and procedures for the collection, analysis, and use of data for its investigations are designed to meet the highest standards of privacy, civil liberties, ethics, and adherence to the US Constitution," it declares.