Microsoft has changed its policy to ban U.S. police departments from using generative AI through the Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully m

Microsoft bans U.S. police departments from using enterprise AI tool

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2024-05-02 19:00:05

Microsoft has changed its policy to ban U.S. police departments from using generative AI through the Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI technologies.

Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for” police departments in the U.S., including integrations with OpenAI’s text- and speech-analyzing models.

A separate new bullet point covers “any law enforcement globally,” and explicitly bars the use of “real-time facial recognition technology” on mobile cameras, like body cameras and dashcams, to attempt to identify a person in “uncontrolled, in-the-wild” environments.

The changes in terms come a week after Axon, a maker of tech and weapons products for military and law enforcement, announced a new product that leverages OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative text model to summarize audio from body cameras. Critics were quick to point out the potential pitfalls, like hallucinations (even the best generative AI models today invent facts) and racial biases introduced from the training data (which is especially concerning given that people of color are far more likely to be stopped by police than their white peers).