Brazos County Adopts Artificial Intelligence Use Policy

Oh, brilliant — Brazos County, Texas, has done it. They’ve adopted an AI use policy. The robots are finally contained, folks. You can sleep easy tonight knowing that county employees in College Station won’t be feeding your property tax records into ChatGPT. That’s right: the policy, as reported by GovTech, "prohibits submission of protected data to public AI tools" and "requires human review for final governmental decisions." Groundbreaking. This is the regulatory equivalent of putting a padlock on the fridge and keeping the key in the same room — technically a barrier, but hardly a fortress.

Naturally, the policy does nothing about AI that doesn't touch "protected data" — so your mundane queries, your autocorrect, your Excel autofill, all fair game. And "human review"? In a county government where the average keyboard has three non-functioning keys and the "IT department" is a guy named Carl who also handles the HVAC? I’m sure that’ll be thorough. The policy is couched as a "proactive step," but really it’s triage after the fact: someone, somewhere, already plugged the wrong data into a bot and the county lawyer went pale. Now they’ve got a shiny PDF to wave around at commission meetings.

This is the new frontier of AI regulation: county commissions and school boards. While the White House debates existential risk and frontier labs release trillion-parameter models, Brazos County is reminding us that the real danger is your town clerk asking a large language model to summarise zoning variance applications. Rogue AI releases? Stateside agents? The policy’s heart is in the right place — but its teeth are about as sharp as a boiled carrot. Still, at least someone’s doing something. Cheers, Brazos County. Maybe next you’ll tackle the office printer.