NBC News reports “federal agencies have started to use sophisticated artificial intelligence tools to help deal with immense caseloads of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests,” citing more than 928,000 such filings in 2022.
The article presents MITRE FOIA Assistant™ as a prototype “that helps locate records within vast government datasets and suggests redactions of information under at least three of the law’s nine categories of exemptions.”
Brad Brown, outcome lead for MITRE’s Center for Government Effectiveness and Modernization, describes the tool as a “cognitive assistant to help analysts." He goes on to explain: “in the end, humans are still going to have to make the decisions.”