Secure LLM for Government: Why Public Sector AI Needs a Different Playbook

Everyone in government is being told the same thing: adopt AI or fall behind.

And for once, the hype isn’t entirely wrong. Large language models can compress hours of document review into minutes. They can surface patterns across thousands of intelligence reports. They can answer complex queries in plain language, generate summaries on demand, and give analysts the kind of cognitive support that was unimaginable five years ago.

But here’s the part the AI evangelists conveniently skip over: the same technology that makes commercial LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity useful in a consumer context is fundamentally unsafe for government use, as-is.