> 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.

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.

I believe the problem is related to staff using free plans of Claude and ChatGPT.

I don't know for ChatGPT but Claude claims that it will keep your chat private and not use your data for training if you are on a paid plan [1], unless you decide otherwise: "By default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products (e.g. Claude for Work, Anthropic API, Claude Gov, etc.) to train our models."

The same statement is missing from the free plan policy page [2] So it's totally reasonable for a Government to block its staff from using free services as this may leak sensitive information. We are doing the same in my organization hoping to protect our intellectual property.

[1] https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/7996868-is-my-data-us...

[2] https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023580-is-my-data-u...

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.

Loads of companies over a small size do this. They have an internal wrapper around the services and you just can’t go direct. Then they can meet local data retention and ensure the vendor is going through their ZDR path. You can even put safeguards inside your wrapper. It’s completely normal.

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.

TL;TR they want people to use Copilot

Important note; “Government Offices of Sweden” or Regeringskansliet as it is named in Swedish is one specific agency. It does not imply, as the title might suggest, that the rule applies to all offices and agencies under the Swedish government.

Makes sense, you don't want civil servants sharing sensitive data with none vetted servicess.

I do feel for the civil servants that have to use Copilot though, it was a breath of fresh air to move to Claude Code when I did, and if Copilot is half as bad as the Google Gemini document integration, which loves to give you variants of "I can not do that". I get why they don't want to use it.

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.

> The use of AI services without a contract can have "consequences for our information security"

Totally logical and smart take. Any govt (or for that matter, anyone) not doing this is just giving all their data to these providers for free.

Glad to know Swedish gov woke up. 6 moths ago they didn´t understood what are the cloud and external data collection. But the recent HugstonOne presentation went to the right people. Heya Sverige.

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.

Seems like it's all about Copilot's increased security, but they refuse to talk about what that means. How is security increased? From what level, to what level? Does anyone know? ... A quick Bing search later, this M$ article is at least a starting point:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/copilot/secu...

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A deal was signed behind closed doors.

Best way to officially support shadow AI at government, sounds great idea

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.

HN is salivating and foaming at the mouth for others to ban US AI companies. The story is being upvoted on the headline alone. HN has turned into a disgusting place and has went the route of reddit.

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

Any university that has not banned these while offering local hosted models is stealing from you. The last thing a real university would do is allow a 3rd party to datamine all the students to destroy their careers before they graduate.

Universities used to do all this stuff in house with super computers, computing labs, personal webspace, email, search engines, etc.

Meh? Most orgs Beyond a certain size maintain a list of which vendors are acceptable.

Total sovereignty starts with your own OS, LLM, GPS, processors, devices mobile and desktop, etc. Everything else is just delusion

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.