About CIAVault.ai
CIAVault.ai is an independent research archive. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the CIA. It is free, has no ads and sells nothing. It exists to make the U.S. government's declassified intelligence records easy to search, read, cite and share.
Where the documents come from
| Source | What we hold | How it is collected |
|---|---|---|
| CIA Electronic Reading Room | About 1,003,493 declassified documents: their catalogue and text, with links to each scan | From the Internet Archive's complete public copy (collection ciareadingroom), because cia.gov does not allow automated collection from the Reading Room. New documents are added every night. |
| cia.gov | The CIA's public pages: stories, press releases, history, museum, maps and publications | Read politely from cia.gov's own site map, at the pace its robots file asks for. |
| National Archives | CIA records released by the National Archives, including the JFK Assassination Records | From archives.gov, at the pace it asks for. |
Every document page links to the original on cia.gov, to the Internet Archive copy and to the scan. The documents are works of the U.S. government and in the public domain. The text comes from optical character recognition of old scans, so it has errors; the scan is always the record.
How answers are made
- Your question is searched against the full text of the archive. The best-matching passages, about a dozen documents, are given to an AI model.
- The model is told to answer only from those passages and to put a numbered source after every claim. Numbers that do not match a source are removed.
- If the documents do not answer the question, it says so rather than guess.
- AI can still be wrong. Read the sources before you rely on an answer, and cite the documents, not the AI.
Generated documents (briefs, timelines, summaries, bibliographies) are made the same way, with a Sources list taken from the archive itself.
Sharing
A share link keeps a copy of what you saw: the question, the answer or document, and its sources, re-read from the archive when the link is made. Anyone with the link can see it. Shared links show no information about you.
Privacy
- You can search, ask, read, download and share without an account.
- Signing in (free, with a VeraGen ID) lets you save searches, answers and documents. They are kept for you only, and you can remove them at any time under My research.
- Questions are processed to answer them and counted to keep the service within its daily limits. We do not sell data or show ads.
About the name
"CIA" in our name describes the records in the archive. CIAVault.ai uses no CIA seal or emblem and makes no claim to speak for the agency.
Contact
Found a problem with a document or an answer? Write to hello@veragen.ai with the document number.