\u201cThe city\u2019s focus has been familiarizing city staff with the guidelines.\u201d<\/p>\n
Molly Onufer, City of Pittsburgh<\/p>\n
The city decided to work with it, creating standards for generative AI usage. The early policy, which became public in 2024 through a series of Public Source articles<\/a>, was largely restrictive, designed to curb risky behavior like putting private resident data into commercial AI tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pittsburgh updated its policy<\/a> in 2025, designating Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat as its recommended tool for city employees. Data entered into Copilot stays within the city\u2019s Microsoft system and isn\u2019t used to train AI models, according to the policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n City employees are also being told which AI tools to use, what information to keep out of them and when to disclose that they\u2019ve used the tech.<\/p>\n FAQ: Pittsburgh\u2019s AI governance<\/p>\n What are the main ethical concerns around city use of AI? Do Pittsburgh police use AI tools? Has AI use by police caused problems before? What is Pittsburgh\u2019s current policy on AI use by city employees? Has the policy changed since then? Is the policy available to the public? What\u2019s next for Pittsburgh\u2019s AI policy? Today, as officials set those guardrails, they\u2019re also leaving room for experimentation, asking how AI could improve city work.<\/p>\n \u201c[An AI] policy \u2014 for, really, private sector, city, anything \u2014 it starts with listening and asking questions,\u201d Tia Christopher, founder of the local AI consulting firm, the Orange Peel Collaborative<\/a>, told Technical.ly.\u00a0<\/p>\n Christopher\u2019s currently working with the city<\/a> to educate employees on the current standards and possibly further develop them. She\u2019s started with a sentiment survey, asking city employees what they think of the AI rollout, what training could be useful, what tasks they\u2019re looking to automate and what outcomes they\u2019re seeking.\u00a0<\/p>\n After more than 200 responses, she\u2019s moving to listening sessions, with plans to release a case study internally this month about how the city can augment but not replace employees with this tech. The alternative could be dystopian, she said: a future Pittsburgh that doesn\u2019t learn from its labor movement past<\/a> and treats humans more like machines.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to believe in that [future],\u201d Christopher said. \u201cI would rather believe in smart tech, where we can all be more creative and all \u2018people\u2019 more.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n So the city has moved from emergency restrictions to preferred tools to employee training in just a few years \u2014 with the aim to govern a technology that is already being used inside city operations. But the timeline for letting the public know about these evolving rules is still uncertain.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe city\u2019s focus has been familiarizing city staff with the guidelines,\u201d rather than making them publicly available, Molly Onufer, city press secretary, told Technical.ly.<\/p>\n AI governance faces a transparency gap<\/p>\n Comparisons to past technological changes can be helpful, but only up to a point.\u00a0<\/p>\n AI is moving much faster<\/a>, according to Beth Schwanke, executive director of the University of Pittsburgh\u2019s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n With that speed comes more opportunities to erode public trust.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNo matter how good the AI is, or how many great systems we have in place,\u201d Schwanke said, \u201cif we don\u2019t have the accompanying governance structures, I do not think people will trust government.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The transparency gap is clearest in one of the highest-stakes areas of city government: policing.<\/p>\n Pittsburgh Public Safety did not respond to questions about what AI, autonomous or algorithmic tools the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police currently uses or whether those tools are governed by a formal policy.<\/p>\n License plate readers<\/a>, gunshot detectors<\/a> and automated police reports<\/a> are among the most common AI applications in law enforcement, according to Schwanke, and some of those tools are already at work in Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n Pittsburgh police used facial recognition software<\/a> soon after the Black Lives Matter protests \u2014 a practice later found to have violated both bureau policy and city law.<\/p>\n AI tools in policing aren\u2019t new, according to Cara Jones, cofounder of the Pittsburgh-based tech company Marinus Analytics<\/a>, but they\u2019ve largely gone unnoticed until now.<\/p>\n Her company\u2019s platform<\/a>, Traffic Jam<\/a>, uses computer vision \u2014 a form of AI \u2014 to scan online sex ads and images, helping investigators gather digital evidence for trafficking cases. Jones said the technology has been used by Pittsburgh Public Safety since 2015 and now operates across four continents.<\/p>\n Traffic Jam has supported local trafficking investigations, though police usually cite the evidence it finds rather than naming the tool itself, Jones said.\u00a0<\/p>\n For Jones, that makes transparency necessary, but not absolute.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do need a certain level of transparency to help promote public trust \u2014 that we\u2019re here to protect and serve for the greater defense and support of victims,\u201d Jones said, \u201cbut if we overshare, there is a real risk that exploitation \u2014 and a criminal exploitation \u2014 learns how to sidestep those protections, and then we have to go back to square one.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Bias, privacy and the limits of safeguards<\/p>\n Bias and privacy are two of the leading ethical concerns presented by the use of AI in government services, according to Schwanke and Vincent Conitzer, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor and AI ethics expert.\u00a0<\/p>\n If AI tools are used carelessly or improperly, sensitive information can slip into systems that weren\u2019t designed to protect it, but that\u2019s just an amplification of the concerns governments already have when using digital tools, Conitzer said.<\/p>\n Bias can be harder to root out.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even when an AI system is trained on data that looks representative of the real world, that data can carry the fingerprints of historical inequalities, such as discrimination in lending, policing or hiring, according to Schwanke.<\/p>\n \u201cI kind of think of it as like a fun house mirror,\u201d Schwanke said. \u201cNot only is it reflecting our existing biases back, it can also make them worse because there is this feedback loop.\u201d<\/p>\n Along with the city\u2019s existing AI guidelines, some internal safeguards may already exist.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jones from Traffic Jam said vendor vetting for AI-enabled tools across law enforcement agencies has become more formal over the last decade, including data privacy reviews and extensive questionnaires.\u00a0<\/p>\n Auditing AI systems only works, however, if governments clearly define fairness and success up front, according to Conitzer.\u00a0<\/p>\n Agencies also need to make the systems transparent enough to inspect and put someone on the hook for monitoring whether they\u2019re doing what they\u2019re supposed to do, Conitzer added. Many of those pieces are still a work in progress for local governments.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re currently in a situation [where] most people are aware of AI to some extent, but detailed expertise is still pretty scarce,\u201d Conitzer said. \u201cWe, as a society, also have to kind of catch up and figure out what we think is responsible behavior,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n So, countering risks today requires a unified, public citywide AI policy, vendor transparency about how tools work and enough flexibility to account for agencies\u2019 different needs, Schwanke said.\u00a0<\/p>\n From what Christopher, the AI consultant, is seeing, that\u2019s what\u2019s happening at city hall.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis has been a three-year process. They observed and did research and had appropriate meetings and stakeholder engagement. They have an ongoing Gen AI working group, where that\u2019s cross-department,\u201d she said, later adding, \u201c[The policy] should be modular, and personally I think the more specific the better.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The rapid evolution of AI tools in public life has left municipal governments, as well as Fortune 500 companies, \u201creally struggling to actually implement and figure out where AI is useful,\u201d Schwanke said.<\/p>\n In the next five years, the novelty of these tools will likely wear off, she added, and as that happens, she expects governments to get a clearer sense of which uses call for new rules, which can fit into existing oversight systems and when AI tools shouldn\u2019t be used at all.<\/p>\n Everything is moving so fast that it\u2019s impossible to accurately predict 10 to 100 to 250 years from now, Conitzer said, but since detailed expertise on AI is still scarce, more oversight can\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n \u201cFive years in AI is an eternity,\u201d Conitzer said. \u201cFive years ago I would not have believed where we are already today.\u201d<\/p>\n This story was fact-checked by Emma Folts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the time generative AI tools like ChatGPT went mainstream in 2023, Pittsburgh city employees weren\u2019t waiting for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[278,4774,73,75,74,9880],"class_list":["post-231708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-ai","tag-municipal-government","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-semiquincentennial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Privacy and bias are the leading concerns, according to experts at Pitt\u2019s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security and CMU. Sensitive information can end up in systems not designed to protect it, and AI systems trained on historical data can carry and amplify existing inequalities in areas like lending, policing or hiring.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh Public Safety did not respond to questions about what AI, autonomous or algorithmic tools the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police currently uses, or whether those tools are governed by a formal policy. But we know from prior reporting that they use license plate readers and gunshot detectors.<\/p>\n
Yes. When Pittsburgh police used facial recognition software following Black Lives Matter protests, the practice was found to have violated both bureau policy and city law.<\/p>\n
The city created standards for generative AI use after employees began using tools like ChatGPT on their own after it went mainstream in 2023, according to the city\u2019s senior manager of innovation. The original 2024 policy was largely restrictive, aimed at preventing risky behavior such as entering private resident data into commercial AI tools.<\/p>\n
Yes. Pittsburgh updated its policy in 2025 to designate Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat as the recommended tool for city employees. Data entered into Copilot stays within the city\u2019s Microsoft system and isn\u2019t used to train AI models, according to the policy. Employees are told which AI tools to use, what information to keep out of them and when they must disclose AI use.<\/p>\n
Not yet. The city\u2019s focus has been familiarizing staff with the guidelines rather than making them publicly available, according to the city\u2019s press secretary.<\/p>\n
A local AI consulting firm is working with the city to educate employees on current standards and possibly expand them. The city has an ongoing cross-department Gen AI working group, and an internal case study is expected this month on ways city employees could augment their work with AI.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/pittsburgh-city-hall-2026-jan-818-scaled.jpg\")
Pittsburgh City-County Building (Danya Henninger\/Technical.ly)<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/pittsburgh-police-public-safety-center-downtown.jpg\")
The Pittsburgh Public Safety Center downtown (Sarah Narrarato\/Pittsburgh Media Partnership)<\/p>\n