CBP To Use Altana’s AI-Powered Map to Investigate Illegal Fentanyl Networks

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Altana has expanded its partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP will use the Altana Atlas, the world’s only dynamic, intelligent map of the global supply chain, to help prevent illegal fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics, as well as their chemical precursors, from entering the United States.

Abuse of fentanyl, methamphetamines, opiates, and other synthetic narcotics is plaguing the United States population, impacting individuals from every part of the country. Many of the narcotics’ chemical precursors come from across global supply chain networks to be manufactured into illicit narcotics in Latin America, where the finished products are then smuggled across the border into the US. At the same time, there are also millions of people in the US who depend upon legal fentanyl and other opioid prescriptions to treat severe pain.

The challenge for CBP is to distinguish the imports of trustworthy pharmaceutical and chemical suppliers using these precursors for legitimate medical purposes from companies manufacturing or transporting these precursors for illicit fentanyl production. The Atlas allows CBP to apply artificial intelligence across the entire global chemical manufacturing and chemical equipment industries to identify which companies are likely to be linked with the downstream manufacturing of illicit fentanyl across global value chains.

This work builds upon Altana’s existing relationship with CBP, which awarded a multi-year contract earlier this year to employ the Altana Atlas in its mission to prevent goods produced using forced labor from coming to the United States.

“Across industries, we are increasingly seeing advanced technologies–artificial intelligence, large language models–being used for good, and this is one of those applications,” said Evan Smith, CEO and co-founder of Altana. “Our team is honored that US Customs and Border Protection is using the Atlas to disrupt the flow of illicit fentanyl while ensuring the supplies of chemicals and medicines from trustworthy businesses.”

By applying artificial intelligence to a vast network of public and private data – the largest, organized, connected body of supply chain data in the world – the Atlas helps customers like CBP to build trusted global supply chains. The Altas enables organizations to see across the global supply chain, automate trade compliance, detect national security threats, eliminate forced labor, measure and manage their environmental impact, detect real time risks and opportunities, and collaborate internally and externally on all of it.