AI Insights
CIO Council asks FedRAMP to prioritize AI tools for approval
CIO Council asks FedRAMP to prioritize AI tools for approval
The Federal CIO Council wrote an August 12 letter asking FedRAMP to focus on cloud services that provide access to conversational AI engines.
Artificial intelligence cloud services now will go to the front of the security certification line. The cloud security program known as FedRAMP will begin prioritizing certain AI cloud services for approval based on five criteria.
The new focus comes at the behest of the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, which wrote an August 12 letter asking FedRAMP to focus on cloud services that provide access to conversational AI engines designed for routine and repeated use by federal workers.
With that in mind, one of the new criteria is for AI tools where there is demand from at least five CFO Act agencies or are specifically recommended by the CIO Council.
“This is a transformative moment for federal cloud security and AI integration,” said Thomas Shedd, the director of the Technology Transformation Services and deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service in the General Services Administration, in a statement. “The emphasis on AI adoption within government meets agencies where they are by providing them with access to authorized emerging technologies that have been vetted using FedRAMP’s security standards. The strategic directive to rapidly deploy secure AI solutions across government is essential to moving agencies forward quickly and effectively. Our team is committed to this bold vision and will work diligently to ensure its success.”
The other criteria include:
- Offering enterprise-grade features including single-sign on, system for cross-domain identity management (SCIM) provisioning, role-based access control and real-time analytics
- Guaranteeing data separation and protection; any model information from training on customer data will not leave the customer environment without customer authorization
- Being available for government use via the GSA Multiple Award Schedule program
- Meeting the requirements for a FedRAMP 20x authorization within two months of acceptance for prioritization
“GSA is taking swift action to prioritize the acceleration of AI adoption across government and deliver on President Trump’s AI Action Plan,” said Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum in a release. “Prioritizing FedRAMP reviews for AI solutions is a critical step in getting trusted AI tools deployed across government and in use to streamline operations and improve workflows.”
The decision by the FedRAMP board, on behalf of the CIO Council, comes after GSA awarded schedule contracts to three commercial AI providers for between $0.47 and $1 in the last few weeks.
Of the three AI tools — Google’s Gemini, Open AI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude — only Gemini has earned a FedRAMP authorization through the company’s workstation offering. Agencies can access Claude for Government through Palantir, according to the FedRAMP marketplace listing. It’s unclear, however, whether the $1 deal with Anthropic includes access through Palantir.
Second attempt to prioritize AI tools
The FedRAMP program office said there are no AI cloud services that currently meet all five criteria.
“What we care about is information and information flows. Whether that information flows to an application programming interface (API) wrapped around a large language model or if it flows to an API wrapped around a PDF management service or a logging service, or anything like that. It’s all treated exactly the same by FedRAMP,” said Peter Waterman, the director of FedRAMP, at the 930Gov conference in late July. “It’s actually kind of cool, in a way, that the process, the whole concept of all the laws, rules, etc., around federal information, just automatically apply and provide perfect ground rules for AI. I found it really fascinating that people tend to want to talk about AI like some magical new thing when it’s really not, like the way that we send information into AI is exactly the same as the way we send information into any other service. So it needs to be managed in the same way.”
This isn’t the first time FedRAMP has prioritized AI tools. In June 2024, the program launched a priority approval process for GenAI tools, specifically used for chat interfaces and code generation, and debugging tools that use large language models (LLMs), and prompt-based image generation as well as associated application programming interfaces (APIs) that provide these functions.
At that time, FedRAMP planned to use its emerging technology prioritization framework to help manage the effort. The program management office cancelled the program in January as required by President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind the executive order that established it.
Copyright
© 2025 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
It seems humanity is running out of children faster than expected. Fertility rates are collapsing around the world, often decades ahead of United Nations projections. Turkey’s fell to 1.48 last year—a level the UN thought would not arrive until 2100—while Bogotá’s is now below Tokyo’s. Even India, once assumed to prop up global demographics, has dipped under replacement. According to a new piece in The Economist, the world’s population, once projected to crest at 10.3 billion in 2084, may instead peak in the 2050s below nine billion before declining. (Among those experts mentioned, by the way, is Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania and visiting AEI scholar.)
From “Humanity will shrink, far sooner than you think” in the most recent issue: “At that point, the world’s population will start to shrink, something it has not done since the 14th century, when the Black Death wiped out perhaps a fifth of humanity.”
This demographic crunch has defied policymaker efforts. Child allowances, flexible work schemes, and subsidized daycare have barely budged birth rates. For its part, the UN continues to assume fertility will stabilize or rebound. But a demographer quoted by the magazine calls that “wishful thinking,” and the opinion is hardly an outlier.
See if you find the UN assumption persuasive:
It is indeed possible to imagine that fertility might recover in some countries. It has done so before, rising in the early 2000s in the United States and much of northern Europe as women who had delayed having children got round to it. But it is far from clear that the world is destined to follow this example, and anyway, birth rates in most of the places that seemed fecund are declining again. They have fallen by a fifth in Nordic countries since 2010.
John Wilmoth of the United Nations Population Division explains one rationale for the idea that fertility rates will rebound: “an expectation of continuing social progress towards gender equality and women’s empowerment”. If the harm to women’s careers and finances that comes from having children were erased, fertility might rise. But the record of women’s empowerment thus far around the world is that it leads to lower fertility rates. It is not “an air-tight case”, concedes Mr Wilmoth.
Against this bleak backdrop, technology may be the only credible source of hope. Zoom boss Eric Yuan recently joined Bill Gates, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon in predicting shorter workweeks as advances in artificial intelligence boost worker productivity. The optimistic scenario goes like this: As digital assistants and code-writing bots shoulder more of the office load, employees reclaim hours for home life. Robot nannies and AI tutors lighten the costs and stresses of parenting, especially for dual-income households.
History hints at what could follow. Before the Industrial Revolution, wealth and fertility went hand-in-hand. That relationship flipped when economies modernized. Education became compulsory, child labor fell out of favor, and middle- and upper-class families invested heavily in fewer children’s education and well-being.
But today, wealthier Americans are having more children, treating them as the ultimate luxury good. As AI-driven abundance spreads more broadly, perhaps resulting in the shorter workweeks those CEOs are talking about, larger families may once again be considered an attainable aspiration for regular folks rather than an elite indulgence. (Fingers crossed, given this recent analysis from JPM: “The vast sums being spent on AI suggest that investors believe these productivity gains will ultimately materialize, but we suspect many of them have not yet done so.”)
Indeed, even a modest “baby bonus” from technology would be profound. Governments are running out of levers to pull, dials to turn, and buttons to press. AI-powered productivity may not just be the best bet for growth, it could be the only realistic chance of nudging humanity away from demographic decline. This is something for governments to think hard about when deciding how to regulate this fast-evolving technology.
AI’s winner-take-all effect, ‘Institutional Edge,’ episode 6 Pensions & Investments
Source link
CASCADE, Iowa — Three Cascade High School students accused of creating fake nude images of other students with artificial intelligence have been charged, according to the Western Dubuque Community School District.
Iowa Public Radio reported back in May, that a group of students allegedly attached the victims’ headshots on other images of nude bodies. School officials say they first were made aware of the images on March 25.
The school district says “any student charged as a creator or distributor of materials like those in question will not be permitted to attend school in person at Cascade Junior/Senior High School.”
The district would not give many more details in the case due to the ongoing investigation and their “legal obligation to maintain student confidentiality.”
-
Business3 weeks agoThe Guardian view on Trump and the Fed: independence is no substitute for accountability | Editorial
-
Tools & Platforms1 month ago
Building Trust in Military AI Starts with Opening the Black Box – War on the Rocks
-
Ethics & Policy2 months agoSDAIA Supports Saudi Arabia’s Leadership in Shaping Global AI Ethics, Policy, and Research – وكالة الأنباء السعودية
-
Events & Conferences4 months agoJourney to 1000 models: Scaling Instagram’s recommendation system
-
Jobs & Careers3 months agoMumbai-based Perplexity Alternative Has 60k+ Users Without Funding
-
Podcasts & Talks2 months agoHappy 4th of July! 🎆 Made with Veo 3 in Gemini
-
Education3 months agoVEX Robotics launches AI-powered classroom robotics system
-
Education2 months agoMacron says UK and France have duty to tackle illegal migration ‘with humanity, solidarity and firmness’ – UK politics live | Politics
-
Podcasts & Talks2 months agoOpenAI 🤝 @teamganassi
-
Funding & Business3 months agoKayak and Expedia race to build AI travel agents that turn social posts into itineraries