Control
Government AI social scoring with detrimental treatment
Government must not use AI to compute a social score that drives unjustified detrimental treatment.
Informational data, not legal advice. Summaries are TwinEthos's own words and rules have not been reviewed by a lawyer: check the official text before relying on any of it. A guard addresses an item; adding it is not a statement that your code meets any law.
Reach
Law in force in Texas (US-TX).
The guard to add
Remove any general social or trustworthiness score built from behaviour or personal traits from government decision paths; decide on criteria tied to the specific program.
In government-context services (benefits eligibility, permits, inspections, enforcement prioritisation), the decision logic and any model or LLM prompt behind it use only inputs relevant to that specific decision, never a cross-context score aggregated from behaviour history, social media, associations or inferred personal traits. Delete or stop computing social_score / trustworthiness_rating style fields, and do not ask a model to rate a person's general worth or reliability. Where a risk model is legitimately used for one program, document its inputs and keep its output from being reused in unrelated contexts to deny, sanction or deprioritise people.
Where it goes: 1 application source code, 2 data models, 7 prompt construction, 9 AI output handling.
What reviewers look for: no field, model output or prompt that rates a person's general social behaviour, trustworthiness or worth (social_score, trustworthiness_rating, categorical_valuation) feeding a denial, sanction or lower priority; decision functions whose inputs are program-specific criteria with a stated reason on each adverse outcome; scores from one program not read by another program's adverse-action path.
Example (Python benefits service), before:
score = social_score(behaviour_history(person), inferred_traits(person))
if score < 40:
application.deny(reason='low citizen score')After:
elig = housing_eligibility(income=app.household_income, size=app.household_size,
residency=app.residency_status) # program criteria only
if not elig.ok:
application.deny(reason=elig.reason) # reason tied to a stated criterionEngineering guidance, not legal advice. Each provision below may add its own details (a cadence, a deadline, a required notice element): open it for those.
Every rule this guard addresses
Binding law — in force (1)
- Texas (US-TX)
- Government must not use AI social scoring (Texas) Tex. Bus. & Com. Code 552.053