$30.3 million over five years is in the Pentagon budget request for “Polygraph+,” an AI- and machine-learning upgrade to federal lie detection that still awaits congressional approval.
The program would add algorithmic scoring and “standoff sensing” that captures physiological signals without attached devices, for employee vetting and insider-threat detection under the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.
The push comes as the Defense Department intensifies leak investigations; the New York Times reported about 50 Joint Staff officers were polygraphed this month after stories on depleted US weapons stockpiles in the Iran war.
Past Pentagon work points to camera-based and non-contact sensing prototypes, but experts say lie detection lacks a reliable biological marker, making AI-enhanced systems vulnerable to the same false positives, bias and countermeasures as traditional polygraphs.
That skepticism is longstanding: federal polygraphs have been criticized for decades, and a flawed system applied across the DoD’s 2.8 million staff could wrongly implicate large numbers of people.