Montgomery County, Pa., Has ‘Taken a Number of Steps’ on AI

(TNS) — The three Montgomery County Commissioners took their monthly meeting on the road Thursday, and conducted business in the evening at the New Hanover Township building where a subject on many minds came up for discussion — artificial intelligence."I want to talk about AI and the demand for public policy around it," said Commissioners Vice Chair Neil Makhija. "You might have seen in the last week there was an incident where one of the AI models was reported to have hacked into another system. Essentially, AI is advancing very rapidly and it's not clear whether alignment can be maintained and whether these systems are going to continue to do what they're established to do or if the robots are going to take over.""That sounds like a gross exaggeration, but when the CEOs of all the companies says there is a 10 percent chance of extinction from what they're creating, we should take it seriously, Makhija said.

Commissioner Tom DiBello thinks it should be taken with a grain of salt."As someone who's spent almost 30 years in technology, typically, when the CEOs of major corporations come out and start warning about stuff, their drive, just so you know this, is to build up the fear and then they want to write policy, that's their recommendation. And their goal is to write policy that favors their companies," DeBello said.According to DiBello's biography on the county website, " Mr. DiBello has over twenty-five years of progressive experience in designing and implementing large global technical software solutions in both the tax and defense industries."

"This has been going on in the technology world for years. So me, having the background I have, I wasn't surprised when I saw that last week, I knew this was coming," he said."Yes, AI is being developed very rapidly, but there are so many different things and constraints that are already in place. It's just a technology. Arnold Schwarzenegger (who played The Terminator, an AI-drive robot assassin in the 1984 James Cameron film of the same name) is not coming back, even though he said 'I'll be back.' He's not coming back as the terminator," DiBello said."But as with any technology, yes there should be guidelines on corporations and all that because we are seeing now that over the years, the federal government didn't allow people to sue the social media, so yes, I think guidelines should be put in place. I'm not saying I'm against that," he said.And I also want to say that this is typical with the technology industry when companies do this, it's always the top six or seven providers that will come out and stand up and say 'we need to do this' and then the federal government, traditionally, will turn to those companies and say 'well help us write those guidelines' and then the guidelines gets written that favor those six or seven companies," said DiBello.However, no tech giants were consulted to help the county undertake its efforts to keep AI under wraps with its new policy."I think it's important to recognize that Montco has taken a number of steps thinking about how we can oversee our use of AI and ensure that it's serving the public interest," Makhija explained. "So we set up an AI council about a year ago and they produced the first set of guidelines, which we passed in the last meeting and it sets a number of areas we're going to make sure that if we use AI technology that any of those uses will follow our guidelines," Makhija said."First, we want to make sure there's transparency when we're using AI and in what circumstances, that the systems are easily understood and they're ethical and equitable in terms of the way they're utilized; that we can test for bias, so that we know what information is going in in order to establish what's coming out is helpful.The third is that there is privacy by design in the systems, that we have data protections; that we're not just putting our information in and our residents' information in and giving it to a private company. We're also outlining where humans should and must be accountable for decisions and outcomes; and that vendors that we utilize are also held accountable for what happens if their produce doesn't do what it's supposed to do," Makhija said."We're the first county in Pennsylvania, I think, to clearly lay this out. And one provision in this resolution that we passed asks the county to produce a list of every technology, service, software whatever we're using that uses AI so that we can measure it against these guidelines and metrics. That gives us a public disclosure obligation in the next 60 days, so if you are interested in this space, stay tuned because we'll be making some disclosures on behalf of the county," Makhija said."A lot more coming on AI. A lot of stuff is going to happen," said DiBello. "It is a very fast moving technology, but we're not at panic state yet."©2026 The Mercury, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.