Microsoft’s AI Copilot Invades Congress

AI has swiftly taken over much of the economy, and now, it appears to be invading our nation’s hallowed halls of power. Axios reports that Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Copilot, will be made available to staff in the House of Representatives, where lawmakers will use it to…well, that part isn’t exactly clear yet.

The House will soon begin using M365 Copilot as part of a broader effort to integrate AI “into its daily operations,” Axios says. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is expected to announce the rollout of the chatbots for staff at an upcoming Congressional Hackathon, the outlet notes.

The deal appears to be part of a new trend where AI companies offer their services to the government for just a dollar. In an email obtained by Axios, House Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor explained that the government was mulling multiple offers like this and that it was “actively engaging in discussions to determine whether these short-term offers are viable for the House and how we can test these platforms’ enterprise levels over the next year.”

Axios claims that the chatbots used by Congress will have “heightened legal and data protections,” although it’s not entirely clear what that means. Gizmodo reached out to Microsoft and to the House for more information.

For whatever reason, it really seems like Congress shouldn’t be using an experimental new technology that it is in the process of trying to figure out how to regulate. AI has occasionally proven itself to have bizarre and, in some cases, potentially dangerous psychological side effects on its users. Let’s face it, this Congress does not need anything to make it more mentally unbalanced. It also has the potential to be a huge data privacy hazard, and, in many cases, has led to litigious battles over copyright issues (just this month, Anthropic agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement for downloading pirated books to train its LLM).

Most importantly, AI has a habit of being wrong about all kinds of stuff. As such, it really doesn’t feel like a tool that Congress should be relying on to get its information. Congress, a largely geriatric class of managerial bumpkin, already seems fairly clueless when it comes to the laws they are passing and what they are about. We don’t really need AI to join in with the corporations and their NGO allies to help write the laws in this country.