The nuanced finding suggests the agency believes the totality of evidence makes a lab origin more likely than a natural origin.

Beijing rejected the CIA’s findings that COVID-19 was likely leaked from a Chinese research laboratory. “It is ‘extremely unlikely’ that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak — this is the authoritative conclusion reached by the experts of the WHO-China joint mission based on science following their field trips to the lab in Wuhan

The CIA says both a natural origin and a lab leak "remain plausible" as potential sources of covid-19, following a review of the pandemic's origins.