FBI fields 139 AI use cases, misses OMB risk deadline
The bureau disclosed 50 cases in January, missed the April 3 OMB deadline for high-impact AI risk management, and hasn't posted an updated inventory, all while running nearly 140 approved systems.
TL;DR
The FBI is running 139 approved AI use cases (nearly triple the 50 disclosed in its January 2026 inventory) Chief AI Officer Katie Noyes said this week at the DODIIS Worldwide Conference. The bureau also missed the April 3 deadline under OMB Memorandum M-25-21 to complete risk management requirements on high-impact deployed AI systems. None of the bureau's nine high-impact cases listed in January had finished those steps, and DOJ has yet to post an updated public inventory. Noyes described an internal risk framework and AI review board but offered no timeline for public disclosure.
The FBI's chief AI officer, Katie Noyes, told the 2026 DODIIS Worldwide Conference this week that the bureau now has 139 approved AI use cases, nearly triple the 50 it disclosed in the Department of Justice's January 2026 inventory. An FBI spokesperson confirmed that the additional approvals "will be reflected in the next annual inventory," but offered no timeline for publication.
That disclosure gap matters because the bureau hasn't met the compliance bar for the systems it has already acknowledged. Of the nine high-impact, deployed AI use cases the FBI listed in January (all tied to law enforcement processes) none had completed the risk management steps required by OMB Memorandum M-25-21. The government-wide deadline for bringing high-impact systems into compliance was April 3, 2026. DOJ missed it, and unlike some other agencies that have since posted updates, the FBI's public inventory remains frozen at the January snapshot.
Noyes described an internal risk framework that breaks down review by application, feeding each use case through an AI review board that tests across environments. "We're getting a lot of really good outputs where we can take a little more risk," she said, alongside cases "where we have to go back to the drawing board because it's just not ready." That's a reasonable operational cadence, but it doesn't substitute for the public transparency OMB M-25-21 requires, and that the bureau's own compliance deadline has now lapsed without an update.
The subtext is a bureau scaling its AI footprint faster than its disclosure machinery can keep up. Noyes emphasized model-agnostic architectures designed to "plug and play" as vendor offerings shift, with cloud providers serving as intermediaries to manage costs she described as "a little steep." The infrastructure ambition is real. The public accounting isn't.
Published ·Deep Fathom