Even the government sometimes freaks out about changes to the terms and conditions.
Documents obtained by Fast Company through a public records request show that officials of at least two federal agencies were, at least briefly, anxious about whether Amazon might have been allowed to train its AI using government data.
The concerns appear to have been short lived, but the exchange highlights how dependent federal agencies have become on companies like Amazon to host government software and data. It also raises questions about whether officials always understand the terms they agree to when contracting with those companies.
The exchange occurred in early 2024, when an IT official at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) wrote to colleagues that Amazon had updated its terms “to allow usage of data outside your environment and even outside of U.S. soil.” The official, who worked in the agency’s Cloud Center of Excellence, had reviewed Amazon’s terms and several articles about the company’s potentially using customer data to train AI. He urged federal officials to “opt out” of allowing Amazon to train its AI on government data and described the issue as an “urgent potential data leakage.”
The person noted that about 22 Amazon services could be affected, including Amazon Rekognition, an image-analysis service that includes facial recognition and has been used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The person also raised concerns about Amazon Polly, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Comprehend. The email urged federal chief information officers, the highest-ranking technology officials at federal agencies, to contact their Amazon representatives and request an “official policy change.”
Amazon, like Google and Microsoft, competes aggressively for federal cloud contracts. Last year, the company said it would invest as much as $50 billion in government computing services.
“It would be very helpful if you raise this issue with your Amazon account team,” the person wrote. The move even attracted attention at the FBI, first reported by FedScoop. At that agency, officials appear to have briefly investigated whether they had any “potential exposure” and analyzed their total Amazon footprint.
The email exchange also reveals that, eventually, Amazon clarified with FBI officials that its services were stored on a separate cloud system and that the changes the company made would not impact FBI data.
These kinds of incidents happen “every day in government tech,” says Varoon Mathur, a former White House Presidential Innovation Fellow and senior adviser to the Biden administration’s federal chief information officer. The confusion stems from procurement officials, who themselves aren’t technical, reading technical service terms; while integrators aren’t incentivized to be proactive about the issue. “Vendors training on government data by accident, on purpose, or in lieu of vague policy is pretty standard,” Mathur tells Fast Company. “People running the procurement are rarely the people who could read a service term . . . and the ones that could are [laid off] and replaced by DOGE boys.”
A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment, and Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for comment. “The FBI will let any material released through the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] process speak for itself,” an agency spokesperson told Fast Company. “We decline to comment further.”