Nyborg admits using AI to assess mother’s complaint

DR reports that Nyborg Municipality used artificial intelligence to help assess a 36-page complaint from Charlotte Svensson, whose son has a disability. The municipality has apologised and reported the incident to the Danish Data Protection Agency as a data breach.

Svensson, from Ullerslev, has spent more than 10 years seeking the right to have the costs of home-based training for her son covered. In June, the municipality’s social affairs department said she no longer met the conditions for funding and that the training should stop.

She appealed. Less than 12 hours after receiving her complaint, the municipality reviewed its decision and upheld it. The speed of the process made Svensson suspect that AI might have been used. The municipality later confirmed that a caseworker had uploaded her complaint to Microsoft Copilot and asked it to summarise the points to consider. The AI-generated summary was then used as a basis for handling the complaint.

The use of AI breached the municipality’s own rules, which prohibit entering personal information into AI tools and using them to handle cases or make decisions affecting residents, unless the law expressly permits it.

Frederik Waage, a professor of administrative law at the University of Southern Denmark, said the municipality may have failed to follow the legal requirement that authorities investigate a case sufficiently before responding. He said it was difficult to see how a sufficiently thorough review could have been carried out in such a short time. If a caseworker does not consider a resident’s arguments, the decision may generally be invalid and require a new ruling, he said.

Earlier this year, the parliamentary ombudsman announced that it would examine AI use in six randomly selected municipalities, including how they comply with data protection and administrative law requirements.