> At the same time, the press service states that some of the staff will continue to have access to a special platform for AI assistants, which the Government Offices themselves developed, and through which they gain access to ChatGPT and Claude.
Sounds like they just want to maintain control over the outbound traffic which sounds rather sensible to me.
It is part of the trend to locally-hosted AI. I demoed my home rig (3x5060s) to my boss last week. It certainly was not as performant as commercial options, but was well above the 90% solution for what we needed. The boss was shocked at the price points for home-built hardware. Gaming GPUs are pricy, but are nowhere near the prices for commercial (rack-mount) compute hardware.
(People actually came by my desk to see "the AI", the physical thing. It blows people's minds to realize AI doesn't need a data center, that it is just some computer parts sitting on a desk.)
The big hitter AI companies see the writing on the wall: open source models and local AI rigs will decimate the market for big AI in the next few years.
Seems like a non-story. It sounds like a ban on people using personal accounts with unsanctioned services and sending government data to them.
This is just an IT org asserting control over how data moves in and out of the business/government. Its seems pretty reasonable that a company/government would want a contract in place with any provider they are sending data to. Oblivious that is going to have costs in agility and picking the best tools, but this is reasonable information security behaviour.
I'm surprised they aren't taking the extra step and moving to restrict data sharing to non-EU firms given... geopolitics.
What a complete nonstory. Even at my 50 person startup we have an IT policy that requires employees to only use approved AI tools. For a government the only real news is that there wasn't already something in place enforcing this.
This seems to be because of sensitive data and auditing, not just contacts.
> The risks of unregulated AI use have been noted within a number of authorities where there has also been reason to take other measures.
> Among them is the Swedish Transport Administration, where the internal audit earlier this year discovered widespread and risky use of about ten different AI services and wrote as follows:
> "We have seen several examples of problematic use of open AI services. The examples concern both the sensitivity of the information entered and how the AI-generated responses have been handled."
> Some staff will continue to have access to a dedicated platform for AI assistants—developed in-house by the Government Offices—which provides access to ChatGPT and Claude.
> Internal information also indicates that, following a review, security measures for the approved tool Copilot have been strengthened. However, the press office has declined to provide details regarding these enhancements, citing security considerations.
There should be a bonus for the sales guy at MS who managed to manipulate some midwit government employee into introducing government regulation to give them a monopoly.
This seems to only be for a few of the offices as well. A famous project (at least in Swedish news) earlier this year introduced airgapped Kimi-based models for usage, but it got paused.
I think some good background for this is also that Skatteverket ("Swedish IRS") has made headlines recently for allowing wide usage of Azure within its IT-infrastructure. Seemingly with very little investigation into the abysmal privacy/integrity/confidentiality posture of US-based cloud services.
I would suspect those headlines caused public officials to investigate how the public sector employees actually use AI chatbots.
One argument could be that they want to provide an AI solution, but maintain some level of control. Copilot can be bundled in with existing licenses, so it's a easier purchase in some sense.
Across the bridge, in Denmark, we've already seen a number of cases where government employees have use various AIs to help them do their job (and in many case used an AI to fail at doing their job). The result has been information about citizens just being entered into whatever AI the employee fancied, without worry about leaking private and sensitive information. I'm not entirely convinced that the public employees strictly speaking needs an AI, but if they are going to use one regardless, it makes sense that it's one that has been approved, whatever that might mean.
That is likely the case. Microsoft is shoving Copilot down everyones throat, whether they want it or not. The sales argument is always: "Why pay for another license if it's already included in O365?" Plus the fact that some data protection contract is already negotiated to be able to use O365 for email.
In the end, if employees are dissatisfied with Copilot, blocking Anthropic and OpenAI will just make people switch to their personal devices and use those services on their smartphones if necessary.
Bit dramatic headline. Every it department or whomever governs data on earth doing it's job is at least thinking of how the organization uses ai. What data it is fed, cost, what actions it can take.
Limiting the amount of tools sounds like a sane default in most cases.
Nothing in this necessarily say anything about one of the tools doing a better job than the other in this regard. It might say a little bit about trust though, warranted or not.
It's not ideal, but governments already use MS products on a large scale. Quite some are cloud-based these days. And they are an established corpo that is doing well financially compared to pure model operator that might be broken up the day after tomorrow for spare parts by their investors and creditors, which put the confidentiality of the conversation logs into jeopardy.
On the one hand, it makes sense to focus on few whitelisted providers with whom there are explicit confidentiality agreements.
On the other hand, the simplest explanation is that the Microsoft grip on those government agencies is strong and with them already exclusively using the Microsoft ecosystem like all swedish public employers are (including universities), it's only the natural next step to strongarm them into using exclusively their AI offering as well.
History will spend a lot of time exploring how the two front runners of AI mismanaged their rep and eroded public trust so severely that people rejected their transformative technology.
We have this discussion with some public customers who want to use LLMs in our products. So far there is no official policy for the public sector so we are telling them to bring their own LLM model either by deploying models to azure in the region they want thus sifting the responsibility onto their contract with Microsoft and off our plate or sign a contract where they acknowledge they understand the risks of using third party llms (we offer, open ai, claude and mistral as providers for now).
Why would you need “AI” in a government office to begin with? Companies are heavily invested in it because of FOMO, but what are they getting from “AI” that’s so essential?
Make no mistake, using AI can be quite helpful and sometimes is necessary. What I mean by “AI” is the way Big Tech packages and sells every kind of automation.
> At the same time, the press service states that some of the staff will continue to have access to a special platform for AI assistants, which the Government Offices themselves developed, and through which they gain access to ChatGPT and Claude.
Sounds like they just want to maintain control over the outbound traffic which sounds rather sensible to me.
The internal service is Microsoft Copilot, so this is probably just a really really dumb decision.
> Sounds like they just want to maintain control over the outbound traffic which sounds rather sensible to me.
Yeah, and probably also forcing Zero Data Retention contracts on those service, instead of the consumer variants.
why then are they using Microsoft Copilot?
It is part of the trend to locally-hosted AI. I demoed my home rig (3x5060s) to my boss last week. It certainly was not as performant as commercial options, but was well above the 90% solution for what we needed. The boss was shocked at the price points for home-built hardware. Gaming GPUs are pricy, but are nowhere near the prices for commercial (rack-mount) compute hardware.
(People actually came by my desk to see "the AI", the physical thing. It blows people's minds to realize AI doesn't need a data center, that it is just some computer parts sitting on a desk.)
The big hitter AI companies see the writing on the wall: open source models and local AI rigs will decimate the market for big AI in the next few years.
Seems like a non-story. It sounds like a ban on people using personal accounts with unsanctioned services and sending government data to them.
This is just an IT org asserting control over how data moves in and out of the business/government. Its seems pretty reasonable that a company/government would want a contract in place with any provider they are sending data to. Oblivious that is going to have costs in agility and picking the best tools, but this is reasonable information security behaviour.
I'm surprised they aren't taking the extra step and moving to restrict data sharing to non-EU firms given... geopolitics.
What a complete nonstory. Even at my 50 person startup we have an IT policy that requires employees to only use approved AI tools. For a government the only real news is that there wasn't already something in place enforcing this.
Makes sense. MSFT is massive in the Nordics. Good luck OpenAI and Anthrop\c!
How is it news that they have preferred tools that they enforce the usage of? Any decently competent IT org should do the same.
This seems to be because of sensitive data and auditing, not just contacts.
> The risks of unregulated AI use have been noted within a number of authorities where there has also been reason to take other measures.
> Among them is the Swedish Transport Administration, where the internal audit earlier this year discovered widespread and risky use of about ten different AI services and wrote as follows:
> "We have seen several examples of problematic use of open AI services. The examples concern both the sensitivity of the information entered and how the AI-generated responses have been handled."
> Some staff will continue to have access to a dedicated platform for AI assistants—developed in-house by the Government Offices—which provides access to ChatGPT and Claude.
> Internal information also indicates that, following a review, security measures for the approved tool Copilot have been strengthened. However, the press office has declined to provide details regarding these enhancements, citing security considerations.
TL;TR they want people to use Copilot
There should be a bonus for the sales guy at MS who managed to manipulate some midwit government employee into introducing government regulation to give them a monopoly.
This seems to only be for a few of the offices as well. A famous project (at least in Swedish news) earlier this year introduced airgapped Kimi-based models for usage, but it got paused.
Anyone got experience with Claude Code gateways?
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/gateways
Seems like a good way to govern usage to an alternate model provider
I think some good background for this is also that Skatteverket ("Swedish IRS") has made headlines recently for allowing wide usage of Azure within its IT-infrastructure. Seemingly with very little investigation into the abysmal privacy/integrity/confidentiality posture of US-based cloud services.
I would suspect those headlines caused public officials to investigate how the public sector employees actually use AI chatbots.
It appears they are only allowing Microsoft Copilot. So it seems like possibly this is contractual with their Microsoft office/windows licenses.
One argument could be that they want to provide an AI solution, but maintain some level of control. Copilot can be bundled in with existing licenses, so it's a easier purchase in some sense.
Across the bridge, in Denmark, we've already seen a number of cases where government employees have use various AIs to help them do their job (and in many case used an AI to fail at doing their job). The result has been information about citizens just being entered into whatever AI the employee fancied, without worry about leaking private and sensitive information. I'm not entirely convinced that the public employees strictly speaking needs an AI, but if they are going to use one regardless, it makes sense that it's one that has been approved, whatever that might mean.
That is likely the case. Microsoft is shoving Copilot down everyones throat, whether they want it or not. The sales argument is always: "Why pay for another license if it's already included in O365?" Plus the fact that some data protection contract is already negotiated to be able to use O365 for email.
In the end, if employees are dissatisfied with Copilot, blocking Anthropic and OpenAI will just make people switch to their personal devices and use those services on their smartphones if necessary.
Bit dramatic headline. Every it department or whomever governs data on earth doing it's job is at least thinking of how the organization uses ai. What data it is fed, cost, what actions it can take.
Limiting the amount of tools sounds like a sane default in most cases.
Nothing in this necessarily say anything about one of the tools doing a better job than the other in this regard. It might say a little bit about trust though, warranted or not.
At first I was like: Nice, they ban AI because its all US based vendors and using them for government related data is not a good idea.
But then the story goes on and say MS Copilot is an approved AI... Sad thing to read.
It's not ideal, but governments already use MS products on a large scale. Quite some are cloud-based these days. And they are an established corpo that is doing well financially compared to pure model operator that might be broken up the day after tomorrow for spare parts by their investors and creditors, which put the confidentiality of the conversation logs into jeopardy.
On the one hand, it makes sense to focus on few whitelisted providers with whom there are explicit confidentiality agreements.
On the other hand, the simplest explanation is that the Microsoft grip on those government agencies is strong and with them already exclusively using the Microsoft ecosystem like all swedish public employers are (including universities), it's only the natural next step to strongarm them into using exclusively their AI offering as well.
History will spend a lot of time exploring how the two front runners of AI mismanaged their rep and eroded public trust so severely that people rejected their transformative technology.
History should spend some time looking at all the prediction-of-doom comments about shit that went on to conquer the world.
Some of my favorites: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
They simply switched to Copilot.
A deal was signed behind closed doors.
We have this discussion with some public customers who want to use LLMs in our products. So far there is no official policy for the public sector so we are telling them to bring their own LLM model either by deploying models to azure in the region they want thus sifting the responsibility onto their contract with Microsoft and off our plate or sign a contract where they acknowledge they understand the risks of using third party llms (we offer, open ai, claude and mistral as providers for now).
>The block is introduced because they want employees to use the services approved by the government office, including Microsoft's AI tool Copilot.
Meh
Why would you need “AI” in a government office to begin with? Companies are heavily invested in it because of FOMO, but what are they getting from “AI” that’s so essential?
Make no mistake, using AI can be quite helpful and sometimes is necessary. What I mean by “AI” is the way Big Tech packages and sells every kind of automation.
I would too if I were a foreign government. The risk of another Room 641A is too high.