Yet another Hacker News

Swedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and Claude

148 points armcat 1 hour ago 65 comments

sevenzero 1 hour ago | parent

>The block is introduced because they want employees to use the services approved by the government office, including Microsoft's AI tool Copilot.

Meh

digitaltrees 1 hour ago | parent

History will spend a lot of time exploring how the two front runners of AI mismanaged their rep and eroded public trust so severely that people rejected their transformative technology.

outime 1 hour ago | parent

They simply switched to Copilot.

Razengan 1 hour ago | parent

History should spend some time looking at all the prediction-of-doom comments about shit that went on to conquer the world.

Some of my favorites: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...

timcobb 1 hour ago | parent

> 20 minute skip protection

Thanks for this

petcat 1 hour ago | parent

It appears they are only allowing Microsoft Copilot. So it seems like possibly this is contractual with their Microsoft office/windows licenses.

jttnr 1 hour ago | parent

That is likely the case. Microsoft is shoving Copilot down everyones throat, whether they want it or not. The sales argument is always: "Why pay for another license if it's already included in O365?" Plus the fact that some data protection contract is already negotiated to be able to use O365 for email.

In the end, if employees are dissatisfied with Copilot, blocking Anthropic and OpenAI will just make people switch to their personal devices and use those services on their smartphones if necessary.

CharlieDigital 1 hour ago | parent

    > Microsoft is shoving Copilot down everyones throat

Of the three, I would rank Microsoft as less risky with data handling. Even if the other two are better products, I can see how data control is an important consideration in government. Of course, best is if they operate a fully controlled platform; that may yet be their endpoint.

gedasss 1 hour ago | parent

Just a reminder: Last year, the email address of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was suspended. Karim Khan couldn’t access his Microsoft account and had to move to Proton Mail.

edukite 35 minutes ago | parent

That's why they backpedal on screenshoting entire screen, keeping images on device and feeding them to LLM? Yeah, for me all of them have 0% trust. Malware used to need to be installed, not part of OS

CharlieDigital 17 minutes ago | parent

That's not how trust works in this context; the trust is in the handling of that data. It should be a given that if you're using a government machine, it's going to be under strict controls in the first place.

redleader55 1 hour ago | parent

You are forgetting something very important. Microsoft has a much better track record of data policies being correctly enforced. Neither OpenAi or Anthropic have that.

It's not about the model or who gets the bribe, like a few folks in this thread imply, it's simply the guarantees that Microsoft is able to give to a public institution about what happens to their data.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

> Plus the fact that some data protection contract is already negotiated to be able to use O365 for email.

This is most likely the key thing. At least here in Europe, already having the processor agreements set up - and Microsoft actually at least trying to do the bare minimum regarding compliance - is worth a lot, even for a nominally inferior product.

mrweasel 24 minutes ago | parent

One argument could be that they want to provide an AI solution, but maintain some level of control. Copilot can be bundled in with existing licenses, so it's a easier purchase in some sense.

Across the bridge, in Denmark, we've already seen a number of cases where government employees have use various AIs to help them do their job (and in many case used an AI to fail at doing their job). The result has been information about citizens just being entered into whatever AI the employee fancied, without worry about leaking private and sensitive information. I'm not entirely convinced that the public employees strictly speaking needs an AI, but if they are going to use one regardless, it makes sense that it's one that has been approved, whatever that might mean.

SoKamil 1 hour ago | parent

TL;TR they want people to use Copilot

adelekeabdulgan 1 hour ago | parent

A deal was signed behind closed doors.

jttnr 1 hour ago | parent

At first I was like: Nice, they ban AI because its all US based vendors and using them for government related data is not a good idea.

But then the story goes on and say MS Copilot is an approved AI... Sad thing to read.

samus 1 hour ago | parent

It's not ideal, but governments already use MS products on a large scale. Quite some are cloud-based these days. And they are an established corpo that is doing well financially compared to pure model operator that might be broken up the day after tomorrow for spare parts by their investors and creditors, which put the confidentiality of the conversation logs into jeopardy.

teiferer 56 minutes ago | parent

On the one hand, it makes sense to focus on few whitelisted providers with whom there are explicit confidentiality agreements.

On the other hand, the simplest explanation is that the Microsoft grip on those government agencies is strong and with them already exclusively using the Microsoft ecosystem like all swedish public employers are (including universities), it's only the natural next step to strongarm them into using exclusively their AI offering as well.

danck 1 hour ago | parent

> At the same time, the press service states that some of the staff will continue to have access to a special platform for AI assistants, which the Government Offices themselves developed, and through which they gain access to ChatGPT and Claude.

Sounds like they just want to maintain control over the outbound traffic which sounds rather sensible to me.

sandworm101 1 hour ago | parent

It is part of the trend to locally-hosted AI. I demoed my home rig (3x5060s) to my boss last week. It certainly was not as performant as commercial options, but was well above the 90% solution for what we needed. The boss was shocked at the price points for home-built hardware. Gaming GPUs are pricy, but are nowhere near the prices for commercial (rack-mount) compute hardware.

(People actually came by my desk to see "the AI", the physical thing. It blows people's minds to realize AI doesn't need a data center, that it is just some computer parts sitting on a desk.)

The big hitter AI companies see the writing on the wall: open source models and local AI rigs will decimate the market for big AI in the next few years.

nayroclade 1 hour ago | parent

They're using Copilot, not locally-hosted AI.

vocram 59 minutes ago | parent

Cool, but that sounds out of reach financially and technically for most people

logicchains 53 minutes ago | parent

The article is about the Swedish Government, hopefully it wouldn't be out of reach for them.

flir 48 minutes ago | parent

I don't think it will be the moment nvidia decide there's more money to be made in selling hardware for local-first inference. They'll do the training themselves and give the models away for free, like the toy in a box of cornflakes.

I'm sure cloud models will always have a slight edge but most tasks, most of the time, won't need that few extra percentage points of performance.

antihipocrat 18 minutes ago | parent

In a lot of sci-fi games an upgrade path for ship/cybernetic hardware is to replace the 'AI chip'. If the models performance ever start to plateau I can't wait to see AI models being baked into the chip itself.

sandworm101 47 minutes ago | parent

>> out of reach financially and technically for most people

Yes and no. I bought most of the hardware before the rampocalypse. It is just an AM4 chip on a nothing motherboard. Even today, 16GB 5060s are maybe 500 each. 64GB of DDR4 is another 500$. Add a power supply and pci risers and the basic parts could be purchased today for around 3000$... call it 4000$ all-in including my labor to get everything connected and talking to each other.

4000$ is money but is also almost nothing in the world of commercial IT purchases.

sebzim4500 49 minutes ago | parent

It's not locally hosted, as they say they will be accessing the same models but through a controlled system rather than on their own accounts

rmnwski 45 minutes ago | parent

Interesting! How many token/s using what model are you getting out of it? And what are the other specs?

snarf21 37 minutes ago | parent

I see this as the eventually end game. Open source models and local hardware are going to be the only path forward for companies as the AI providers move to a constant need to increase prices to drive profitability and stock price.

WarmWash 14 minutes ago | parent

Just like on-prem killed cloud?

nradov 8 minutes ago | parent

There's no particular benefit to keeping the hardware local unless you have extraordinary security requirements. Over time most of the workloads will end up in data centers with the cheapest electricity and real estate.

wafflemaker 29 minutes ago | parent

Can you post a picture? It sounds super cool. Was it a specialized hardware, or a consumer mobo with 3 PCIe slots?

sandworm101 11 minutes ago | parent

It is just a Asrock motherboard and 1000w corsair power supply sitting on the bottom shelf of a "mining rack" open air case. The GPUs are attached with janky pci risers (the motherboard has four pci slots). I went with 5060s so I could stay with "short" 2-fan cards. The boot drive is a 500GB NVME with an encrypted 2tb NVME for storage, both on the mobo. I added four cheap fans and an oldschool (with a nob) fan controller to circulate air away from the GPUs. RAM options are maxed out at 4x16GB DD4 sticks. Expansion options include adding a fourth 5060 and any number of SATA storage drives for content/models.

adelekeabdulgan 55 minutes ago | parent

why then are they using Microsoft Copilot?

przmk 51 minutes ago | parent

Probably for the same reason as in most companies: Microsoft “assured” them that their data is safe… who cares about the Cloud Act, right?

mr_mitm 47 minutes ago | parent

Or: Microsoft has the data already, so why give the data to Anthropic and OpenAI, too?

nalekberov 45 minutes ago | parent

I second this.

kevin_thibedeau 31 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft will helpfully house that data in China. The others won't.

igl 27 minutes ago | parent

AWS and GCP also use local Chinese joint-venture partners to comply with Chinese regulations. Warm greetings to Moscow!

tonyhart7 12 minutes ago | parent

I rather trust MS than OpenAI or Antrophic

MS don't train your data

Roark66 19 minutes ago | parent

Same reason why the Fortune 200 company I'm currently doing some work for uses it. 70% discount on api costs compared with Anthropic, but access to the same Anthropic models.

Here every person gets $500 of copilot "credits" per month and that is a lot of use. $500 in Anthropic API gets used in 3 days.

The only disadvantage is that copilot cli has a very crappy and limited plugin system. For example a plugin can register a hook when a model calls a tool, but it's impossible to show a question to a user from such plugin.

Also it's "Autopilot" mode is designed to waste tokens. It injects things like "did you do absolutely everything you can about this? If not continue" and it's impossible to disable this without reverse engineering.

erwald 47 minutes ago | parent

The internal service is Microsoft Copilot, so this is probably just a really really dumb decision.

laurentiurad 37 minutes ago | parent

No, they use OpenAI with deployment in the Swedish data centers, which keeps inference local. Azure and GCP already offers this. No idea about Claude though.

soco 29 minutes ago | parent

Maybe it's what you meant, but let me underline that "local" does NOT mean under your control. As long it's with Microsoft, it will fall under the exactly same Cloud Act, so it can be shut off or copied over the pond on a whim.

laurentiurad 9 minutes ago | parent

You're right in theory, but it doesn't mean the US gov has unrestricted access to the data. There needs to be a legal process in place and there are safeguards that prevent accessing the data without that. This will happen to any company within US jurisdiction, as authorities can compel any provider to give them the required data.

lucumo 36 minutes ago | parent

> Sounds like they just want to maintain control over the outbound traffic which sounds rather sensible to me.

Yeah, and probably also forcing Zero Data Retention contracts on those service, instead of the consumer variants.

theplumber 15 minutes ago | parent

The contracts are really worthless if for example Trump wants to share the transcripts with Putin. At this point I don’t understand why governments would outsource any of their data services to 3rd parties (I.e outside of the EU)

sorenjan 1 hour ago | parent

This seems to be because of sensitive data and auditing, not just contacts.

> The risks of unregulated AI use have been noted within a number of authorities where there has also been reason to take other measures.

> Among them is the Swedish Transport Administration, where the internal audit earlier this year discovered widespread and risky use of about ten different AI services and wrote as follows:

> "We have seen several examples of problematic use of open AI services. The examples concern both the sensitivity of the information entered and how the AI-generated responses have been handled."

> Some staff will continue to have access to a dedicated platform for AI assistants—developed in-house by the Government Offices—which provides access to ChatGPT and Claude.

> Internal information also indicates that, following a review, security measures for the approved tool Copilot have been strengthened. However, the press office has declined to provide details regarding these enhancements, citing security considerations.

mjr00 1 hour ago | parent

What a complete nonstory. Even at my 50 person startup we have an IT policy that requires employees to only use approved AI tools. For a government the only real news is that there wasn't already something in place enforcing this.

techjamie 19 minutes ago | parent

Same at my work. We have access to our own LLM tools that are backed by OAI/Claude depending on user pref, but with data retention/training contracts in place so they don't keep/train on our internal data.

johanneskanybal 1 hour ago | parent

Bit dramatic headline. Every it department or whomever governs data on earth doing it's job is at least thinking of how the organization uses ai. What data it is fed, cost, what actions it can take.

Limiting the amount of tools sounds like a sane default in most cases.

Nothing in this necessarily say anything about one of the tools doing a better job than the other in this regard. It might say a little bit about trust though, warranted or not.

whirlwin 1 hour ago | parent

Anyone got experience with Claude Code gateways?

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/gateways

Seems like a good way to govern usage to an alternate model provider

catears 55 minutes ago | parent

I think some good background for this is also that Skatteverket ("Swedish IRS") has made headlines recently for allowing wide usage of Azure within its IT-infrastructure. Seemingly with very little investigation into the abysmal privacy/integrity/confidentiality posture of US-based cloud services.

I would suspect those headlines caused public officials to investigate how the public sector employees actually use AI chatbots.

TazeTSchnitzel 11 minutes ago | parent

Apparently Skatteverket was just about to migrate to Office 365 for email until other administrative agencies complained: https://www.realtid.se/it-tech/skatteverkets-microsoftmejl-s...

I can't fathom why they would willingly try to migrate such critical operations away from a secure state-run system. I'm sure that system sucks in some ways. But those issues can be worked on, surely.

christkv 49 minutes ago | parent

We have this discussion with some public customers who want to use LLMs in our products. So far there is no official policy for the public sector so we are telling them to bring their own LLM model either by deploying models to azure in the region they want thus sifting the responsibility onto their contract with Microsoft and off our plate or sign a contract where they acknowledge they understand the risks of using third party llms (we offer, open ai, claude and mistral as providers for now).

bittermandel 46 minutes ago | parent

This seems to only be for a few of the offices as well. A famous project (at least in Swedish news) earlier this year introduced airgapped Kimi-based models for usage, but it got paused.

jgalt212 44 minutes ago | parent

I would too if I were a foreign government. The risk of another Room 641A is too high.

nalekberov 40 minutes ago | parent

Why would you need “AI” in a government office to begin with? Companies are heavily invested in it because of FOMO, but what are they getting from “AI” that’s so essential?

Make no mistake, using AI can be quite helpful and sometimes is necessary. What I mean by “AI” is the way Big Tech packages and sells every kind of automation.

CerebralCerb 30 minutes ago | parent

There should be a bonus for the sales guy at MS who managed to manipulate some midwit government employee into introducing government regulation to give them a monopoly.

yxhuvud 24 minutes ago | parent

How is it news that they have preferred tools that they enforce the usage of? Any decently competent IT org should do the same.

paaloeye 22 minutes ago | parent

Makes sense. MSFT is massive in the Nordics. Good luck OpenAI and Anthrop\c!

a_humean 20 minutes ago | parent

Seems like a non-story. It sounds like a ban on people using personal accounts with unsanctioned services and sending government data to them. Even most small companies might have restrictions like this.

This is just an IT org asserting control over how data moves in and out of the business/government. Its seems pretty reasonable that a company/government would want a contract in place with any provider they are sending data to. Oblivious that is going to have costs in agility and picking the best tools, but this is reasonable information security behaviour.

I'm surprised they aren't taking the extra step and moving to restrict data sharing to only EU based firms given... geopolitics.

all3z 13 minutes ago | parent

Important note; “Government Offices of Sweden” or Regeringskansliet as it is named in Swedish is one specific agency. It does not imply, as the title might suggest, that the rule applies to all offices and agencies under the Swedish government.

Kuyawa 7 minutes ago | parent

Total sovereignty starts with your own OS, LLM, GPS, processors, devices mobile and desktop, etc. Everything else is just delusion