Mayor Katie Wilson lifts restrictions on city employees' AI use

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson will allow city workers to use an artificial-intelligence assistant as part of their daily work, she said Monday, lifting a pause on the technology that she put in place earlier this year.

Workers can now use Microsoft Copilot "for day-to-day tasks," she wrote. More publicly available AI tools - such as ChatGPT - will be blocked.

"We want to equip our teams with the tools they need to create, learn, and do their best work while having peace of mind that these tools won't violate the public's trust and privacy, harm the people we serve, or take away our employees' jobs," she said.

The announcement was part of a broader outlook for AI in Seattle that lays out in general terms Wilson's hopes for balancing the technology while promising more specific legislation in the future.

"I am committed to using the City's public policymaking power to shape an AI future that centers human flourishing and ensures we do not socialize the costs of AI or privatize all of its benefits," she said.

Seattle already kicked off an AI framework under former Mayor Bruce Harrell, which declared that "Seattle will use AI." The city has piloted programs aimed at speeding the permitting process, analyzing near-miss traffic incidents and providing chatbots for customer service. One partnership with the University of Washington is analyzing the city's many laws to look for contradictions and redundancies.

Part of that program included a February rollout of Copilot, following a 500-person pilot last year. City leadership believed at the time that it could be beneficial to productivity. They also understood that workers were widely using publicly available tools, which posed a risk to the city's ability to keep residents' personal information secure and comply with public disclosure laws.

But concern among unions and workers about job replacement has remained consistent, a fact they communicated to now-Mayor Wilson. Coupled with her desire to better understand the city's approach to AI technology, she paused the Copilot rollout earlier this year.

The conversation around AI, though, is inevitable and has already come directly to Wilson's doorstep. Seattle City Light, for example, received applications for five powerful new data centers in city limits from four companies, forcing Wilson to crystallize her own views. She responded by announcing a temporary moratorium while the city works out how to avoid broad rate hikes as a result of the new power demands.

Applications for two of those data centers have since been withdrawn.

Wilson's vision does not shy away from AI adoption or its potential benefits to the local economy, calling its potential "extraordinary."

The "fundamental question," she said, is "how do we support and promote innovation while also ensuring the benefits of that innovation are broadly shared?"

Wilson promised to clarify the city's internal AI policies over the next four years as she and her team explore its possible benefits for permitting and other bureaucratic processes.

She also promised to work with local businesses and entrepreneurs to promote new innovations while seeking guardrails to prevent abuses.

"Seattle has the potential to lead the way as a national example of how to develop AI that centers human flourishing," she said.

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