Artificial Intelligence for Adjudication: The Social Security Administration and AI Governance
Stanford Digital Government Hub
Ref: SRC-002-USA-003
Accessed: 10/31/2025
Summary
Detailed case study of SSA's AI development, focusing on the Insight software and the organisational conditions that enabled its creation. Documents how OAO overcame bureaucratic barriers through 'stealth innovation', blended expertise of legal and technical staff, and iterative development. Describes Insight's NLP and ML features for quality checking ~30 areas of adjudicative decisions. Reports Insight fully deployed at appeals level since late 2017 and hearings level since late 2018. Also covers QDD predictive model, naive Bayes workload prioritisation, and clustering for case assignment.
View Harvard reference
Glaze, K., Ho, D.E., Ray, G.K. and Tsang, C. (2024). Artificial Intelligence for Adjudication: The Social Security Administration and AI Governance. Stanford, CA: Stanford Digital Government Hub. Available at: https://dho.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/SSA.pdf (Accessed: 31 October 2025).