Artificial intelligence (AI) use has grown rapidly in the last few years, with 44% of businesses taking steps to integrate it into their current processes and applications. However, while AI can offer many business benefits, such as increased productivity, accuracy, and cost savings, using AI comes with risks. Consequently, steps must be taken to reduce these risks and promote AI's safe and trustworthy use. An effective way to do this is to introduce governance mechanisms or codify risk management requirements in the law. Accordingly, policymakers worldwide have begun to propose regulations to make AI systems safer for those using them.

While many of these efforts target AI applications by businesses, governments are also starting to use AI more widely, with almost 150 significant federal departments, agencies, and sub-agencies in the US government using AI to support their activities. As such, governmental use of AI is also starting to be targeted, with initiatives to govern the use of AI in the public sector increasingly being proposed. In this blog post, we provide a high-level summary of some of the actions taken to regulate the use of AI in public law, focusing on the US, UK, and EU, first outlining the different ways governments use AI.