A month later, the U.S. Supreme Court did. In Chatrie v. United States<\/a>, the Justices heard the first case testing whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment<\/a>. A geofence warrant is<\/a> a legal order for a technology company to comb every users\u2019 location data to identify the devices that were near a crime scene. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit<\/a> has held<\/a> that these warrants are unconstitutional because they are \u201cgeneral warrants\u201d\u2014the same open-ended writs that colonial British officers once employed against the American colonists. The constitutional framers wrote the Fourth Amendment to forbid general warrants because they do not identify specific subjects to be searched and could be used to search anyone. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit<\/a>, reviewing<\/a> the same question en banc, could not agree. The court split<\/a> evenly, seven to seven, on whether collecting the data was even a \u201csearch,\u201d and affirmed the appealed decision without a majority rationale.<\/p>\n Geofence warrants are just one kind of \u201creverse search.\u201d These searches begin with a place, an image, a search term, or a behavioral pattern, then work backward to identify people from population-wide datasets. The split between the Fourth and Fifth Circuits shows how hard they are to regulate. While a court may focus on the single technology at issue in a particular case, executive action could set standards for the entire category of reverse searches. That is the gap that the recent AI framework could fill but does not; it sets<\/a> no rules for reverse searches as a category.<\/p>\n The framework is explicit about what AI governance is for. It protects<\/a> children from AI-generated abusive material. It urges<\/a> the U.S. Congress to stop the government from coercing AI platforms to restrict speech based on political ideology. It opposes<\/a> any new federal AI rulemaking body. What it does not address is the constraint aimed at the government itself: the limits the Fourth Amendment places on how the government uses AI to search. The same document that invokes<\/a> the First Amendment<\/a> to check government overreach through private platforms says nothing about government overreach through search warrants.<\/p>\n Chatrie itself may not settle the issue. The case concerns<\/a> a 2019 search that relied on Google location data. In 2023, Google migrated<\/a> its users\u2019 location histories off of its centralized \u201cSensorvault\u201d database and onto users\u2019 individual devices. A geofence warrant works by compelling a company to search its own database\u2014move that data off of the database, and there is little left for a geofence warrant directed at Google to reach. That change does nothing, however, about keyword warrants, facial recognition\u2014used<\/a> by at least 18 of 24 federal agencies surveyed in 2020\u2014predictive policing algorithms, or other reverse-search tools.<\/p>\n Commentators expect<\/a> a narrow ruling in Chatrie, perhaps one resting on the defendant\u2019s decision to opt in to Google Location History. That question covers one company and one crime. The question it sidesteps is larger: May the government use reverse-search warrants across AI systems with no direct statutory rules restricting those warrants?<\/p>\n The legal landscape that the framework inherits offers little protection. Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act<\/a> in 1986, before smartphones or location databases existed. President Joseph R. Biden\u2019s two relevant executive orders\u2014Executive Order 14074<\/a> on policing reform and Executive Order 14110<\/a> on AI governance\u2014were both rescinded<\/a> at the start of the second Trump Administration. The new framework advocates<\/a> for a federal AI law that preempts state AI laws, yet it sets no federal floor for law enforcement\u2019s use of AI. States that have restricted geofence warrants or paused facial recognition now face the prospect of preemption without nothing put in its place. Neither had the rescinded Biden-era orders set a statutory standard. A durable federal floor has to come from Congress.<\/p>\n What that floor should contain is not a mystery. Model legislation<\/a> already supplies workable language: escalating judicial approval required at each stage of a reverse search, limits confining these warrants to serious felonies, and mandatory deletion of data drawn from unlawful collection. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act<\/a> passed the U.S. House of Representatives 219 to 199 with bipartisan support, which shows that statutory particularity standards for government data access are politically viable. Congress does not need the Supreme Court\u2019s permission to recognize that AI-powered dragnet searches raise constitutional problems.<\/p>\n The White House\u2019s framework recognizes that AI is too consequential to leave to 50 state legislatures working without coordination. Then, incongruent with that principle, it says nothing about the constitutional limits on government surveillance. A policy document that uses the First Amendment to limit what the government may ask technology companies to do, but no the Fourth Amendment to limit what data the government may order them to produce, is an incomplete framework for AI governance.<\/p>\n ![\"Ali](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/aliansariheadshot.png\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recent artificial intelligence guidance fails to address the government\u2019s use of AI for searches. In March 2026, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,1798,25,48222,11760,48223,48224,48225,2770],"class_list":["post-91626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-governance","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-electronic-communications-privacy-act","tag-first-amendment","tag-fourth-amendment","tag-geofence-warrants","tag-geofencing","tag-trump-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}