In April 2023, a Stanford study found rapid acceleration in the U.S. federal government spending in 2022. In parallel, the House Appropriations Committee was reported in June 2023 to be focusing on advancing legislation to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) in an increasing number of programs and third-party reports tracking the progress of this legislation corroborates those findings. In November 2023, both the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of State (DoS) released AI strategies, illustrating that policy is starting to catch up to, and potentially shape, expenditures. Recognizing this criticality of this domain on government, The Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative (AIET) has been established to advance good governance of transformative new technologies to promote effective solutions to the most pressing challenges posed by AI and emerging technologies. In this second in a series of articles on AI spending in the U.S. federal government, we continue to follow the trail of money to understand the federal market for AI work. In our last article, we analyzed five years of federal contracts. Key findings included that over 95% of AI-labeled expenditures were in NAICS 54 (professional, scientific, and technical services); that within this category over half of the contracts and nearly 90% of contract value sit within the Department of Defense; and that the vast majority of vendors had a single contract, reflecting a very fragmented vendor community operating in very narrow niches. All of the data for this series has been taken directly from federal contracts and was consolidated and provided to us by Leadership Connect. Leadership Connect has an extensive repository of federal contracts and their data forms the basis for this series of papers. In this analysis, we analyzed all new federal contracts since our original report that had the term “artificial intelligence” (or “AI”) in the contract description. As such, our dataset included 489 new contracts to compare with 472 existing contracts. Existing values are based on our previous study, tracking the five years up to August 2022; new values are based on the year following to August 2023.
Full research : The funding from the United States government helped advancement of artificial intelligence and AGI technology.
