NSA tells Congress: billions this year testing AI models

The NSA's disclosure to Congress marks a shift in how the cost of AI oversight is being tallied. The agency says computing power is its biggest expense, and staffing adds to the bill because it has to compete with the pay packages AI labs offer. That has pushed lawmakers' expectations for full-scale oversight to tens of billions of dollars a year, far above the Congressional Budget Office's earlier estimate of about $20 million a year for a bipartisan bill to create a center for AI risks. Whether that funding materializes — and who covers it — is likely to shape how quickly oversight takes shape.

In health care, the cost driver is different: not the price of AI itself, but how hospitals and insurers use it for billing. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association accuses hospitals of using AI-assisted coding to code cases as more severe and add secondary diagnoses, collecting nearly $12,000 more per case on average without any apparent change in treatment. For hospitals it pays off — McLaren Health Care CFO Dave Mazurkiewicz says the system brings in an extra $1 million a month using software from SmarterDx, and the vendor gets a cut of the added revenue. Insurers respond by using AI to comb through records for claims they can deny, which Caroline Pearson of the Peterson Health Technology Institute says leads both sides to go several rounds per dispute "because it's cheap."

Both cases point to the same tension: the money AI saves in some places shows up as new costs elsewhere. David Brailer, writing in Health Affairs, says he expects AI to raise overall health care spending, just as electronic health records did before it. For the NSA, the debate over who should foot the bill has already started, with Nat Purser of the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute proposing a levy that would have developers help pay for independent testing — and with Anthropic and OpenAI having signaled they might be willing to pay for more government oversight, according to The Washington Sun.