Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that representatives of DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — gained access to sensitive data at the Department of Education and fed it into AI software.This has raised red flags over whether it violates federal privacy law. We reached out to DOGE for comment, but didn’t hear back.But there are ways to use AI to improve efficiency without raising privacy concerns. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Kevin Frazier, contributing editor at the publication Lawfare, about how the government has used AI in the past and how it could use it more responsibly in the future.The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Kevin Frazier: The federal government’s use of AI really spans decades, if we’re going to be honest, because how you define AI is a whole, other hour-long conversation, if not two-hour-long conversation. But here we can even just look back to the end of 2024 when we had an inventory done of the federal government’s use cases o