Marquette County committee approves tighter AI policy, warns staff not to use public chat models

The Marquette County Executive and Finance Committee on June 10 approved a revised county AI policy and agreed to forward the measure to the full county board.

Corporation counsel (Sean) and IT staff told the committee the rewrite adds enforceable controls on approvals, documentation, records retention and security tied to county use of artificial‑intelligence tools. Counsel and staff sharply cautioned against entering county information into public consumer models. "Do not put county information into public consumer grade language models — Gemini, ChatGPT — anything like that," counsel said, stressing that the county’s licensed Microsoft Copilot tenant keeps data inside the county’s environment.

IT staff said the county retains a limited number of Copilot licenses for use with sensitive material and that employees using county data must have an assigned license. Committee members asked about training and monitoring; IT staff said they have begun training sessions and set keyword alerts to flag risky uses.

A motion to approve and send the policy to the full board passed after a recorded vote; the committee recorded one opposition during the motion. The committee did not change the policy’s scope in open session and directed staff to provide the policy packet to the full board for final action.

The next procedural step is committee transmission to the county board; no implementation deadline was specified during the meeting.