The Department of Homeland Security is rolling out three $5 million AI pilot programs across three of its agencies, The New York Times reports. Through partnership with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, DHS will test out AI models to help its agents with a wide array of tasks, including investigating child sex abuse materials, training immigration officials, and creating disaster relief plans.
In February, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas traveled to Mountain View, California — famously the headquarters of Google — to recruit AI talent, and wooed potential candidates by stressing that the department is “incredibly” open to remote workers. Hiring enough AI experts isn’t DHS’s only hurdle. As the Times notes, DHS’s use of AI hasn’t always been successful, and agents have previously been tricked into investigations by AI-generated deepfakes.