The GAO’s April report on federal AI acquisitions (GAO-26-107859) title reads agencies “should collect and apply lessons learned to improve future procurements.” They are not doing it. Federal agencies more than doubled their use of AI between 2023 and 2024, and across the four departments GAO examined – Defense, Homeland Security, GSA and Veterans Affairs – not one was systematically documenting what it had learned from buying any of it. Nothing new under the public sector’s sun.
The reason is deceptively simple: officials did not record lessons because “their departmental policies and guidance do not require them to do so.” Not incompetence, just an absent requirement, which inside a bureaucracy is the same thing as a prohibition.
GAO also highlights that agencies fail to collect lessons “including when an acquisition was discontinued.” But the discontinued acquisitions are the expensive ones: somebody already paid for the finding that a tool did not survive a real caseload, and that finding now sits in somebody’s head who might not have the incentive of going around screaming “it didn’t work!”
GAO’s remedy is a repository at GSA. But a repository is a place to put things, and the finding was that nobody is required to put anything anywhere…
Assorted links
- Argentina’s Senate is debating a reform of its 1972 companies law recognising a “sociedad automatizada” run by autonomous algorithms without employees. It does name a human representative to answer for the company – who may be exactly the person who decided nothing. Argentinian friends: is that the whole of it?
- The EU opened its call for up to seven AI gigafactories on July 30, €10 billion public against €20 billion private, with a November 12 deadline that is itself a filter for who already has the capacity to bid.
- METR put GPT-5.6 Sol’s 50% time horizon at 11.3 hours and then said it does not consider the number a robust measurement of anything. Expect the 11.3 hours in a procurement business case within the year, disclaimer stripped, as evidence that an agent can cover a caseworker’s day.