The White House Puts New Guardrails on Government Use of AI
WiredMAR 12 2024
The US Treasury Department used artificial intelligence (AI) to recover $1B in check fraud during the 2024 fiscal year, as well as other types of fraud, bringing the total amount recovered to $4B, or six times that recovered last year.
A Treasury official said they used AI to find "hidden patterns" of fraud, though exactly how AI was used was not disclosed. This saved an additional $2.5B by preventing high-risk transactions and $500M from "risk-based" screenings.
While significant progress has been made for the Treasury, which processes an annual 1.4B payments worth $6.9T, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report showed the government still loses between $233B and $521B in fraud every year.
While we must be cautious around these still novel technologies, this news should excite every taxpayer who cares about their money being safe and used correctly. Since AI is now able to learn from its own machine learning systems, it can analyze and detect patterns of fraud in milliseconds. We'll always need humans to ensure proper use, but with the help of AI, criminals should prepare for a hard road ahead.