The renewal is with a data broker whose Locate X system has harvested GPS from unwitting people and whose AI agents are pitched as able to bypass consumer safety filters.

Recently released renewal paperwork shows the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is moving to acquire AI-driven agents that keep watch on where cellphones are, what people post on social media, and credit-header records.

The solicitation went up on SAM.gov, the federal contracting portal, last Wednesday, with bids due no later than August 5, 2026. In its filing, the agency says it needs cloud-based software that pulls data together in real time, analyzes it, and delivers risk intelligence to support its work protecting investors and keeping markets fair.

The purchase renews and extends an existing arrangement rather than opening a new one. Access under the renewal would begin August 14, 2026, the day after a $1.4 million, five-year agreement between the SEC and Babel Street — which started August 9, 2021 — comes to an end.

A price sheet attached to the filing, portions of it blacked out, covers the licenses being renewed and names Locate X, Babel Street's most contentious offering. Over the years, Locate X has amassed exact GPS positions from the private phones of unwitting people worldwide through behind-the-scenes arrangements with app developers. Each yearly package also bundles ten licenses for the company's Insights Platform, entry to U.S. credit-header and criminal-records data, and the capacity to place 12,000 requests to its identity API.

Babel Street runs deep into the intelligence world. Locate X is overseen in part by Patrick Butler, a former senior targeting officer at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center who founded the In-Q-Tel-backed firm PATHAR/Dunami; after Babel Street bought it in June 2020, he rose to executive vice president. Several other former senior CIA figures have advised or worked at the company, among them ex-chief operating officer Maura Burns, one-time top data scientist Barbara Stevens, and Dare King, a former operating chief of the agency's hacking division.

Another document filed with the renewal describes Babel Street broadening its tools around AI agents. Among the features cited for the SEC licenses are agentic workflows the vendor says can run intricate, many-stage threat probes on their own, expose supply-chain weaknesses, and gather digital telemetry. One filing asserts that Babel Street's AI agents can get around the guardrails built into mainstream consumer AI systems so analysts can search and condense extremist messaging and other harmful content. The company also casts its defense-sector threat hunting as an approach now in use at the SEC.

An academic study released in August 2024 warned that cellphone location data could let SEC investigators themselves be tracked and their inquiries laid bare — and the records suggest those same investigators are now leaning on the very kind of data that could be turned against them.