The Pentagon wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on a new generation of lie detection technology that would use artificial intelligence, machine learning and remote sensors to assess whether people are telling the truth, according to a Department of Defense budget request.
The program, called Polygraph+ or Polygraph Next, is being pitched as an effort to "modernize federal polygraph and credibility assessment technologies" and improve their accuracy and reliability. But the proposal is already drawing skepticism from researchers and legal experts who say the project risks automating a method that has long been criticized as scientifically shaky, legally limited and vulnerable to misuse.
"It's a misguided effort to reduce the complex to something that is tangible," said Kyri Kotsoglou, a legal scholar at Northumbria University in the UK who studies the use of polygraphs in the justice system. Another expert described AI-enabled lie detection as "the worst of both worlds," reflecting a broader concern that machine learning could lend a false aura of precision to a technology whose basic assumptions remain disputed.
The initiative comes amid heightened internal pressure inside the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has increasingly turned to polygraph tests in an effort to identify the sources of leaks to the press. In September, the New York Times reported that around 50 officers on the Joint Staff had been given polygraph tests after news coverage reported the depletion of US weapons stockpiles in the war with Iran. The new funding request suggests the department is not only relying on the old tool, but trying to rebuild it with newer technology.
Polygraph+ would be run by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, or DCSA, which handles background checks for the federal government. According to the budget document, the technology would be used for vetting prospective employees and for "insider threat detection." The request has not yet been approved by Congress, and the agency did not respond to a request for more information about which specific systems it intends to use.
The budget materials point to a broader Pentagon effort to find alternatives to the conventional polygraph, which has changed little since it was invented in the 1920s. Traditional examiners measure blood pressure, pulse, breathing and sweat responses, then compare reactions to baseline questions such as "Is the sky blue?" with responses to target questions like "Have you ever committed a crime?" The theory is that deceptive answers produce measurable physiological changes. In practice, critics say the method is highly subjective and prone to error.
That skepticism is not new. The federal government conducts tens of thousands of polygraph tests each year during employee screening, but the technology's reliability has been repeatedly challenged, and its results are rarely admissible in court. The source material notes that in 1983, Congress had already begun grappling with the limits of the technique, underscoring how long the debate has persisted without a definitive resolution.
The Pentagon's latest proposal suggests it is looking for a technological leap rather than a policy rethink. One clue came in 2023, when the Defense Innovation Unit ran an open submission process to identify companies with products that could be used for deception detection. It selected two firms to build prototypes: Presage Technologies, which says it can measure heart rate and breathing rate using standard cameras, and Altec Research, a medical sensor company expanding into non-contact sensing technologies.
A screenshot of Altec's prototype, released by the DIU, showed that it tracks head movement, facial skin temperature and pore activity. Those kinds of signals are part of the Pentagon's emerging interest in "standoff sensing," a term for collecting physiological readings without attaching a device to a subject's body. Supporters may see that as a way to make screening faster, less intrusive and more scalable. Critics see a new layer of complexity wrapped around an old problem: inferring intent from physiology.
The central challenge is that stress, fear, confusion, fatigue and cultural differences can all affect the same bodily signals that polygraphs interpret as signs of deception. Adding artificial intelligence may improve pattern recognition, but it does not necessarily solve the underlying question of whether those patterns reliably distinguish truth from falsehood. If anything, experts warn, it could make the system harder to challenge because algorithmic scoring can appear objective even when the underlying science is uncertain.
Neither Presage Technologies nor Altec Research responded to requests for comment, and the DIU declined to comment on the prototype work. That leaves the Pentagon's vision for Polygraph+ still opaque, even as the budget request signals a serious institutional bet on the next phase of credibility testing.
For now, the proposal sits at the intersection of national security, workplace screening and the growing military appetite for AI. Whether Congress approves the money or not, the idea itself reflects a familiar government impulse: when an old surveillance tool fails to deliver certainty, build a smarter one. The question, as critics have long argued, is whether certainty is something a machine can actually detect at all.