The Future is Here: FOIA, Advanced Technology, and Artificial Intelligence
Ryan Mulvey
Welcome to Sunshine Week 2025!
In 1921, during his speech acknowledging receipt of the Noble Peace Prize, the Norwegian historian Christian Lous Lange warned that “[t]echnology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” I think Lange intended his message to be two-fold: While technology can be used in so many innovative and exciting ways to improve society and the lives of individuals, rapid technological development can also pose an almost insidious threat. When technology falls into the wrong hands or is developed with minimal oversight or without any overarching ethical framework, it can turn into a weapon that ultimately defeats the promise of a better and brighter future.
Although I am hardly a pessimist on the wisdom of mobilizing advanced technology and artificial intelligence for improved administration of the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”), I recognize there is pressing debate about how these technologies should be operationalized. For all the great promise of making agency processes more efficient and economical—or for improving the requester experience—there may be reasons to worry about the unintended consequences of at least certain technologies on open government. We see hints of this in conversations about ChatGPT, novel forms of encrypted instant messaging (e.g. Signal), and even the use of generative AI “bots” for drafting and submitting requests, on the requester side, or preliminarily processing records on the agency side, including the proposed use of statutory exemptions or drafting of determination letters. It goes without saying, too, that ongoing debate finds itself in a new atmospheric context given the new Administration’s bold efforts to transform the federal bureaucracy, both in terms of staffing decisions and intra-agency priorities, as well as its concrete goal of making the Executive Branch leaner, more efficient, and ostensibly more transparent to the federal taxpayer.
This year, American for Prosperity Foundation is proud to dedicate its Fifth Annual Sunshine Week Symposium to exploring all of these issues. Again, technological developments, such as the transition to electronic records, have already long impacted FOIA administration. But the advent of advanced AI is prompting particularly important conversations about the limits of relying on AI-driven systems to assist in the management, processing, and disclosure of agency records. On the one hand, AI systems will almost certainly improve agency capacity for records management and retrieval. Searching for records should be easier! But can AI be trusted with undertaking declassification review? Or responsiveness review? Or proposing redaction? And what impact will the use of AI, other natural language processing models, and machine learning have on the ability of requesters to challenge agency action, let alone the likelihood of courts rejecting withholdings that are statistically likely to be “correct” based on the “science” of AI?
These are not easy questions. Moreover, on top of any theoretical or jurisprudential concerns, there are practical ones. Agencies have long struggled to keep their IT infrastructure up to date. FOIA offices are notoriously understaffed and underfunded, comparatively speaking. How likely are we to actually see advanced technologies and AI systems acquired and implemented? Is AI a realistic priority for agencies?
We are excited to welcome experts from the field to share their thoughts on these questions over the coming days. They include:
- Nick Wittenberg, Armedia
- Alex Howard, Civic Texts
- Jason R. Baron, University of Maryland
- Irvin McCullough, Government Accountability Project
Check back tomorrow morning for our first essay. And please be sure to join us on Thursday, March 20, at 10:15am for a panel discussion with all the symposium contributors. The conversation will be live and in-person as part of Sunshine Fest. You can register online, too. The goal of our conversation will be to propose concrete action items for ensuring that technology is directed to improve FOIA and government transparency.
Happy Sunshine Week!
Ryan P. Mulvey is policy counsel at Americans for Prosperity Foundation and counsel at Cause of Action Institute. He currently serves as President of the American Society of Access Professionals. Together with two former colleagues, he helps manage FOIA Advisor, a free resource on the federal Freedom of Information Act. Ryan currently serves on the 2024-2026 term of the National Archives Federal FOIA Advisory Committee.