Published on June 11, 2025
In the news this week: San Francisco’s City Attorney announced plans to use AI to streamline municipal codes. A position paper argues that collective bargaining rights for information producers could help to balance their power against AI product builders. Saudi Arabia aims to use AI-powered surveillance technology to improve safety during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage, while a new tool that uses AI tools to track body features and accessories could allow law enforcement agencies to circumvent bans on facial recognition technology. OpenAI is being ordered to store ChatGPT conversations indefinitely. Read more in this week’s AI News That Caught Our Eye.
InnovateUS delivers no-cost, at-your-own-pace, and live learning on data, digital, innovation, and AI skills. Designed for civic and public sector, programs are free and open to all.
June 10, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Generative AI for Public Sector Communicators: Tools, Ethics, and Best Practices, John Wihbey, Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) & Associate Professor, Northeastern University
June 12, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Community Engagement for Public Professionals: Interviews, Deborah Stine, Founder and Chief Instructor, Science and Technology Policy Academy
June 17, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Community Engagement for Public Professionals: Focus Groups, Deborah Stine, Founder and Chief Instructor, Science and Technology Policy Academy
June 18, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Leading Through Reform: Strategies to Engage Complex Teams, Malena Brookshire, Executive Steering Committee member, NextWave Federal Finance Leadership Program
June 24, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Building Better Access: Portland’s GenAI Pilot for Smarter Permitting Appointments, Hilaire Brockmeyer, Interim Business Solutions Division Manager, City of Portland, Oregon, Cristy Rowley, UX Researcher, US Digital Response
For more information on workshops, visit https://innovate-us.org/workshops
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AI for Governance
“EPA has a new generative artificial intelligence tool. And it believes climate change is dangerous…the AI tool threatens to provide answers that contradict the agency’s leader...”
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“San Francisco’s municipal code runs about the same length as the entire U.S. federal rulebook…No lawyer, or even a team of them, could ever muck out all the redundant and outdated sections contained in it…City Attorney David Chiu, a former state assembly member and city supervisor [called Stanford’s AI experts to help him out]. A team from Stanford’s Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab trained an AI program to chew over a city’s legal code in search of every instance in which a city department is mandated to produce a report. Then Chiu’s team went to those departments to see which reports could be tweaked for efficiency, combined with similar requirements, or slashed altogether. Now Chiu is sponsoring city legislation that would change more than a third of the nearly 500 reporting requirements that can be altered by a city ordinance. Chiu wants to do away with 140 of them entirely.”
Read articleAI Infrastructure
“This position paper argues that there is an urgent need to restructure markets for the information that goes into AI systems. Specifically, producers of information goods (such as journalists, researchers, and creative professionals) need to be able to collectively bargain with AI product builders in order to receive reasonable terms and a sustainable return on the informational value they contribute. …without increased market coordination or collective bargaining on the side of these primary information producers, AI will exacerbate a large-scale ‘information market failure’ that will lead not only to undesirable concentration of capital, but also to a potential ‘ecological collapse’ in the informational commons..”
Read articleAI and Public Safety
“Facial recognition systems use artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in faces, and they've come under increasing scrutiny, particularly in policing. There have been multiple instances of false positives leading to the arrest and detainment of innocent people. There's no federal regulation of this technology, but at least a dozen states have laws that limit its use. So, some law enforcement authorities have turned to a new system called Track, made by a company called Veritone. It doesn't analyze faces, but looks to the rest of the body for clues — things like clothing, body type or hair — according to recent reporting by James O'Donnell for MIT Technology Review. ”
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“The Hajj, one of the largest gatherings of humans on Earth, is meant to be undertaken by every adult Muslim once in their lifetime. During those days, up to 2 million pilgrims from over 180 countries will take part in a number of different religious ceremonies in Mecca. But having so many people moving around in one comparatively small area has led to problems in the past. Thousands of pilgrims were killed in stampeding crowds in 1990 and 2015. This year, Saudi Arabia will use drones with thermal imaging as well as artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to ensure that only those who have Hajj permits are allowed in. All the technology, surveillance and advanced algorithmic calculation is meant to make the event safer and the chance of tragic accidents less likely. But as the amount of technology grows, so too do concerns about data privacy, state surveillance and potential cybercrime.”
Read articleAI and Public Safety
“Anthropic on Thursday announced Claude Gov, its product designed specifically for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. The AI models have looser guardrails for government use and are trained to better analyze classified information. Claude Gov models are specifically designed to uniquely handle government needs, like threat assessment and intelligence analysis, per Anthropic’s blog post. And although the company said they ‘underwent the same rigorous safety testing as all of our Claude models,’ the models have certain specifications for national security work. For example, they ‘refuse less when engaging with classified information’ that’s fed into them, something consumer-facing Claude is trained to flag and avoid.”
Read articleGoverning AI
“OpenAI is NOW DIRECTED to preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying), whether such data might be deleted at a user’s request or because of ‘numerous privacy laws and regulations’ that might require OpenAI to do so. SO ORDERED. s/ Ona T. Wang”
Read articleGoverning AI
“The new book Empire of AI by longtime technology reporter Karen Hao unveils the accruing political and economic power of AI companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment….[the] book comes at a time when Republican congressmembers are trying to block states from regulating AI. The House recently passed Trump’s so-called big, beautiful budget bill, that contains a provision that would prohibit any state-level regulations of AI for the next decade, in major gift to the AI industry.”
Read articleGoverning AI
“Picture this: You give a bot notice that you’ll shut it down soon, and replace it with a different artificial intelligence system. In the past, you gave it access to your emails. In some of them, you alluded to the fact that you’ve been having an affair. The bot threatens you, telling you that if the shutdown plans aren’t changed, it will forward the emails to your wife. This scenario isn’t fiction. Anthropic’s latest A.I. model demonstrated just a few weeks ago that it was capable of this kind of behavior. Despite some misleading headlines, the model didn’t do this in the real world. Its behavior was part of an evaluation where we deliberately put it in an extreme experimental situation to observe its responses and get early warnings about the risks, much like an airplane manufacturer might test a plane’s performance in a wind tunnel. But to fully realize A.I.’s benefits, we need to find and fix the dangers before they find us.”
Read articleGoverning AI
“The AI Policy Playbook outlines essential components for policymakers to consider when cooperating to chart their own AI paths and developing context-specific AI governance frameworks to support responsible and open AI ecosystems in Africa and Asia. This playbook and its lessons, drawn from African and Asian contexts, are aimed at government officials and policymakers in these geographies more broadly. Audiences in other parts of the world can also gain meaningful and more diverse perspectives on how AI policy development can be approached, facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas. The playbook covers different forms of AI policy and governance, like national strategies and guidelines for AI, offers a practical, first-hand reference for AI policymaking in member countries of the AI Policymaker Network, and guides the readers with lessons learned and on-the-ground insights from local policymakers and practitioners.”
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