New research consortium will use AI to support and enhance intelligence analysis for national security
5 December 2025
Cardiff University is a partner in a £1.2M research grant to develop AI methods to support and enhance intelligence analysis for national security and defence.
The AiTASHA project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), aims to improve the speed and confidence of intelligence analysts’ assessments by building new AI tools that can work alongside human analysts.
Intelligence analysts are routinely required to make high-consequence, defensible assessments from vast, complex and uncertain datasets, to identify indicators and warnings of hostile or malicious activities.
Analysts must make these assessments rapidly in a highly-pressured and resource-constrained environment, where they face difficult choices of what data to analyse first, and whether to gather additional intelligence, potentially at the cost of delay or increased risk. Addressing this challenge is becoming increasingly urgent as both the scale and complexity of intelligence datasets, as well as the threat posed to UK safety, are growing.
For this project, Cardiff is part of a consortium including experts spanning three leading British universities; Warwick, Southampton, Dundee and the Alan Turing Institute, working closely with UK government defence and national security partners.
The researchers will build explainable, defensible AI to complement, rather than replace, the work of intelligence analysts, by recommending which existing data should be prioritised for human review and which potential new data should be prioritised for acquisition.
Professor Jon Gillard, Cardiff University’s lead on the grant from School of Mathematics, said: “Intelligence analysts are working at the limits of what is humanly possible. The volume, velocity and diversity of data they must interpret has grown dramatically, yet their judgements remain central to safeguarding the UK. This project brings together decades of UK leadership in structured expert judgement, statistical modelling and explainable AI to build tools that genuinely enhance, not replace, human expertise.
"Our goal is to create defensible, ethical AI systems that can help analysts focus on what matters most: identifying early signs of emerging threats and making robust, timely assessments in high-pressure environments. "
By developing methods that prioritise the right data at the right moment, and by embedding human reasoning at the core of the technology, we aim to deliver AI that strengthens national security in a safe, transparent and trusted way.
Deputy Head of School
Dr Richard Walters, Lead Research Data Scientist at the Turing’s Defence AI Research Centre (DARe), added: “Developing specialised artificial intelligence tools to support national security analysts is a vital area of research, aimed at keeping our country safe. Analysts are often required to make critical assessments under intense pressure. This work explores how machines can help intelligence analysts respond to increasingly complex threats and datasets in a more efficient way, whilst maintaining their existing high legal and ethical standards.”
AiTASHA stands for AI Intelligence Triage & Acquisition Support for Human-centred Analysis. The funding will support four post-doctoral researchers and significant collaborative activity across academia and external stakeholders.