Friend and foe: A study on the Dutch intelligence service’s sense-making of AI

Artificial intelligence is increasingly discussed and explored within national security practices, offering intelligence agencies new opportunities while raising significant operational, legal, and ethical dilemmas. This article analyzes how professionals (N = 10) working in and around the Dutch intelligence and security domain make sense of artificial intelligence in the multi-agency policing of hybrid threats, while navigating tensions between national security and fundamental rights. Centered analytically on the General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), this article draws on qualitative empirical material and document analysis focusing on the AIVD’s role within the contemporary intelligence–policing matrix. The study adopts an abductive, interpretive approach to uncover how artificial intelligence is understood, implemented, and justified in a context of legal constraint and democratic accountability. The findings show that artificial intelligence is interpreted simultaneously as operationally indispensable and inherently risky. Meaning, it enhances analytic precision while also producing uncertainty, bias, and epistemic ambiguity. Practitioners therefore deploy artificial intelligence cautiously, relying on legal safeguards, human oversight, and incremental experimentation to preserve legitimacy. The analysis conceptualizes this ambivalence as a form of artificial intelligence liminality, in which professionals operate between innovation and restraint, efficiency and accountability. The article concludes that sense-making is central to how artificial intelligence acquires meaning and power in intelligence work, shaping both its use and the ethical boundaries that govern it, and discusses future research directions and governance implications.