A GAO survey of federal employee AI usage finds that 61 percent use publicly available AI tools like ChatGPT for work tasks without agency approval, creating significant data protection and security risks.
A Government Accountability Office survey of federal employee AI usage found that 61 percent of federal employees use publicly available AI tools — including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others — for work-related tasks without explicit agency approval. The survey covered 14,200 federal employees across 23 agencies.
The survey found that employees use unapproved AI tools for drafting documents and emails (72 percent of users), summarizing long documents (68 percent), researching policy questions (54 percent), analyzing data (31 percent), and generating code (24 percent).
Twelve percent of AI-using employees reported entering information they later recognized as sensitive into unapproved AI tools, including personally identifiable information, agency-sensitive procurement information, and information potentially subject to classification review.
Most employees using unapproved AI tools report doing so out of convenience and productivity motivation rather than deliberate policy circumvention — the vast majority simply were not aware that their agency had AI use policies. This finding underscores the training gap rather than a compliance culture problem.
GovAcademy's AI Prompting for Civil Service course (GA-029) addresses this specific challenge by teaching federal employees to use AI tools effectively while understanding data protection boundaries, agency policy requirements, and the criteria for evaluating whether information is appropriate for AI tool input.
The GAO survey recommended that all federal agencies develop and communicate clear AI use policies and provide mandatory training on those policies to all employees before enforcing them.
OMB responded by committing to publish an updated AI Acceptable Use Policy template for federal agencies within 90 days, further driving demand for the employee-facing AI literacy training that GA-029 provides.