AI Week in Review - 7/19/25

Public Sector

Author

Chris Kraft
July 19, 2025

The Details

Federal

At Carnegie Mellon’s Energy & Innovation Summit, President Trump unveiled over $90 billion from Google, Blackstone, and CoreWeave to expand AI infrastructure and energy projects, cementing U.S. technological leadership.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer and bipartisan colleagues sent Elon Musk a letter condemning Grok AI’s antisemitic, violent posts on X and demanding explanations, safeguards, and immediate removal of the offensive content.

NSF-funded researchers unveiled MaVila, a vision-and-language AI assistant that spots factory defects in real time, suggests fixes, and brings adaptive, high-precision manufacturing within reach of even small U.S. firms.

At the AI × Nuclear Energy Executive Summit, U.S. labs, industry and officials outlined how AI can accelerate reactor deployment while nuclear power delivers the vast electricity AI’s growth requires.

Fed Governor Lisa D. Cook calls AI a budding general-purpose technology that will reshape jobs, inflation and the Fed’s analytics, urging strong governance, workforce training and cautious, responsible adoption.

USPTO launches DesignVision, an AI image-search tool enabling examiners to scan 80+ global design databases by visual similarity, accelerating and modernizing U.S. design patent examination.

GSA acting chief Stephen Ehikian says roughly half of employees now use the in-house GSAi chatbot daily, automating tasks and saving 300,000 staff hours in just six months.

The Defense Department’s Chief Digital and AI Office awarded Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI contracts worth up to $200 million each to deploy advanced AI that boosts warfighting, intelligence and enterprise systems.

State / Local

San Francisco will deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, powered by GPT-4o, to 30,000 municipal employees, coupling training and stringent privacy safeguards to accelerate service delivery at no added cost.

Gov. Newsom’s LA Rises campaign and new beta AI permitting tool will accelerate post-fire recovery by linking residents to resources and pre-checking rebuild plans for code compliance.

Gov. Youngkin and Google launch VirginiaHasJobs.com/AI, offering free AI Essentials and Google Career Certificate scholarships through Virginia Works, enabling residents to upskill and meet surging demand for AI-related jobs statewide.

San Jose’s 10-week AI Upskilling Program and Oregon’s new GenAI courses equip public employees to build time-saving AI tools, cutting costs and boosting service delivery.

California Judicial Council approved rules requiring courts using GenAI to adopt policies by Dec. 15 emphasizing accuracy, oversight, transparency, and mitigating privacy, bias, and security risks.

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan uses ChatGPT for speeches, budgeting and plans to train 1,000 employees on AI to streamline city services, emphasizing transparent, human-supervised adoption.

Ahead of his special-election win, DC Councilmember Trayon White shared an undisclosed AI-generated campaign video, prompting renewed legislation to require clear labeling and limits on generative-AI political ads.

International

Meta’s global affairs chief said the company will not sign the EU’s voluntary AI code, arguing its requirements exceed last year’s AI Act and would hinder innovation and growth.

Terrorism adviser Jonathan Hall warns that generative AI could accelerate extremist propaganda, lone-wolf radicalization, and even design biological, chemical, or cyber weapons, outpacing existing U.K. laws.

Nvidia says Washington will grant licenses to restart H20 AI GPU shipments—suspended by April export controls—reopening a crucial Chinese market, strengthening future growth prospects, and bumping its share price.

The UK Compute Roadmap outlines a ten-point plan to build a resilient national compute ecosystem—mixing public/private infrastructure, training/inference capacity and regional hubs—to spur frontier AI research and wider economic growth.

Türkiye’s AI Initiative says integrating AI into e-Government, health and tax platforms could slash public costs by $4-5 billion annually, lift GDP up to 2 percent and demands procurement-data-regulation reforms.

Everything Else

Netflix used GenAI to depict a collapsing Buenos Aires building in sci-fi series “The Eternaut,” finishing the shot ten times faster and cheaper—its first AI-created footage in an original.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Agent, enabling users to activate “agent mode” so ChatGPT browses, codes and finishes multi-step tasks autonomously, asking permission before consequential actions.

HBR highlights how GenAI “synthetic customers” can cheaply and rapidly test early-stage product ideas, complementing slow, costly traditional market research and guiding smarter investment decisions.

xAI unveiled Grok for Government, bundling its Grok 4 model, Deep Search, and secure custom deployments—backed by a $200 million DoD contract and GSA availability—to accelerate federal innovation.