WASHINGTON: Today, the Committee on House Administration has released its July 2024 Flash Report on Artificial Intelligence.

This is part of a series of flash reports that provide an update on the use of AI technology by House offices and Legislative Branch agencies, as summarized by their response letters sent to the Committee on House Administration. 

Top Takeaways: 

  • The Committee is focused on applying the House’s AI Guardrails to the acquisitions process, with these guardrails being used to evaluate IT approvals.

  • The Committee is working with legislative branch agencies on their AI implementations, including the Government Publishing Office, Chief Administrative Office, Office of the Clerk, and the Library of Congress. In the last three months: 

    • The GPO has decided to set up a small AI innovation lab, which would help it keep pace with other legislative branch agencies.

    • The Library of Congress is continuing plans to use AI to expedite drafting, reviewing, and publishing of bill summaries, timely and relevant information for Congress.

    • The Smithsonian has launched new and interesting pilot projects, such as using AI to try to understand bird speech and to identify tree species through drone photos.

    • The AOC is working to establish a Chief AI Officer, and has performed risk analysis and approved several requests for AI-driven image, audio, and video editing tools.

    • U.S. Capitol Police utilizes commercial threat analysis tools that use non-generative AI to aid in the detection and investigation of threats to the congressional community.

    • The CAO has made significant progress to explore high security LLM solutions like Microsoft Azure Open AI and AWS’s Bedrock, with these foundations being critical for securing the House's sensitive data at an enterprise level.

    • The Office of the Clerk is using AI code-generation tools to accelerate development and detect flaws in coding of public websites.

Click the image or here to view the latest flash report.

Background: 

The Committee on House Administration is working to bring Congress into the 21st century.

In 2023 generative AI disrupted multiple industries, including government operations. AI presents rank-and-file congressional staff with opportunities for dramatically increased efficiency across a wide variety of use cases. At the same time, AI presents the House with unique governance challenges. Transparency is essential to ensuring Congress maintains a detailed understanding of the use of AI in service to the institution and the American people. CHA requested monthly updates between August and November 2023 and these updates have expanded and are continuing into 2024.

Click here to view previous flash reports or learn more.