Monday, December 15, 2025

How is the age of data or the reversal of precedent or new information factored into the large language models used by AI?

https://www.bespacific.com/how-congress-is-wiring-its-data-for-the-ai-era/

How Congress Is Wiring Its Data for the AI Era

The First Branch Protocol: “The Government Publishing Office grabbed the spotlight at the final Congressional Data Task Force meeting of 2025 last Wednesday by announcing that it is launching a Model Context Protocol server for artificial intelligence tools to access official GPO publication information. The MCP server lets AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini pull in official GPO documents, allowing them to rely on current, authoritative information when answering questions. Here’s why this matters. Large Language Models are trained on large collections of text, but that training is fixed at a point in time and can become outdated. As a result, an AI may not know about recent events or changes and may even give confident but incorrect answers. Technologies like an MCP server address this problem by allowing an AI system to consult trusted, up-to-date sources when it needs them. When a question requires current or authoritative information, the AI can request that information from the MCP server, which returns official data—such as publications from the Government Publishing Office—that the AI can then use in its response. Most importantly, the design of an MCP server allows for machine-to-machine access, helping ensure responses are grounded in authoritative sources rather than generated guesses. Adding MCP creates another mechanism for the public to access GPO publications, alongside search, APIs, and bulk data access. It is a good example of the legislative branch racing ahead to meet the public need for authoritative, machine-readable information. GPO’s Mark Caudill said his office implemented the MCP both to respond to growing demand for AI-accessible data and to avoid having to choose the “best” AI agent. This is in line with GPO’s mission of being a trusted repository of the official record of the federal government. With a wide range of AI tools in use, from general use ones like ChatGPT and Gemini to more specific ones geared toward legal research, GPO’s adoption of MCP allows it to be agnostic across that ecosystem…”





Perspective.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/against-the-federal-moratorium-on-state-level-regulation-of-ai.html

Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI

Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. To many, this was catastrophic. The few massive AI companies seem to be swallowing our economy whole: their energy demands are overriding household needs, their data demands are overriding creators’ copyright, and their products are triggering mass unemployment as well as new types of clinical psychoses. In a moment where Congress is seemingly unable to act to pass any meaningful consumer protections or market regulations, why would we hamstring the one entity evidently capable of doing so—the states? States that have already enacted consumer protections and other AI regulations, like California, and those actively debating them, like Massachusetts, were alarmed. Seventeen Republican governors wrote a letter decrying the idea, and it was ultimately killed in a rare vote of bipartisan near-unanimity.

The idea is back. Before Thanksgiving, a House Republican leader suggested they might slip it into the annual defense spending bill. Then, a draft document leaked outlining the Trump administration’s intent to enforce the state regulatory ban through executive powers. An outpouring of opposition (including from some Republican state leaders) beat back that notion for a few weeks, but on Monday, Trump posted on social media that the promised Executive Order is indeed coming soon. That would put a growing cohort of states, including California and New York, as well as Republican strongholds like Utah and Texas, in jeopardy.



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