Swedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and Claude

sevenzero

>The block is introduced because they want employees to use the services approved by the government office, including Microsoft's AI tool Copilot. Meh

digitaltrees

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.

petcat

It appears they are only allowing Microsoft Copilot. So it seems like possibly this is contractual with their Microsoft office/windows licenses.

SoKamil

TL;TR they want people to use Copilot

adelekeabdulgan

A deal was signed behind closed doors.

jttnr

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.

danck

> 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.

sorenjan

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.

mjr00

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.

johanneskanybal

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.

whirlwin

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

catears

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.

christkv

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).

bittermandel

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.

jgalt212

I would too if I were a foreign government. The risk of another Room 641A is too high.

nalekberov

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.

CerebralCerb

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.

yxhuvud

How is it news that they have preferred tools that they enforce the usage of? Any decently competent IT org should do the same.

paaloeye

Makes sense. MSFT is massive in the Nordics. Good luck OpenAI and Anthrop\c!

a_humean

Seems like a non-story. It sounds like a ban on people using personal accounts with unsanctioned services and sending government data to them. Even most small companies might have restrictions like this. 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 only EU based firms given... geopolitics.