Trump set off a surge of AI in the federal government. See what happened.

Washington Post: “As the Trump administration seeks to sweep away obstacles to developing artificial intelligence, the president’s team has brought its zeal for the new technology to the federal government itself. Orders came down from the White House budget office in April urging every corner of the government to deploy AI. “The Federal Government will no longer impose unnecessary bureaucratic restrictions on the use of innovative American AI in the Executive Branch,” the White House said in a statement announcing the push. Officials across the government answered the call, according to a Washington Post analysis of more than two dozen recent agency disclosures on AI use. On top of automating rote tasks, government agencies have launched hundreds of artificial intelligence projects in the past year, many of them taking on central and sensitive roles in law enforcement, immigration and health care. The Department of Homeland Security has adopted new, more sophisticated facial recognition tools. The FBI has purchased novel systems to sift through reams of images and text to generate leads for investigators. And the Department of Veterans Affairs is developing an AI program to predict whether a veteran is likely to attempt suicide. Revoking — even scorning — the Biden administration’s caution, the White House has directed government departments to cut through any red tape that might slow the adoption of AI. “Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’” the Trump administration’s AI action plan says.

Federal agencies are doing just that: The 29 that had posted data last week listed 2,987 active uses for AI by the end of 2025, up from 1,684 the year before. The disclosures are required by the budget office and provide basic details about each use of AI. Hundreds of those uses were marked as “high impact,” meaning they are being used as the main basis for making significant decisions or have implications for people’s rights or their safety, according to federal standards…”