What's at stake:
A top city leader said the City of Fresno is beholden to private companies behind the software and programs the city needs in order to function. She also doesn't think there's any other choice but to adapt to technological advancements.
When a top city official said Fresno was being held “captive” by private companies and their proprietary software, she meant it.
The surprisingly candid conversation took place in public during a budget hearing last month when Councilmember Miguel Arias began prodding for answers on how much the use of artificial intelligence is costing the city.
“I suspect that AI is going to be like meth,” Arias said at the June 8 budget hearing. “They give it to you at a really cheap price on day one, and then they’re going to rob you and rape you on year two because now we’re on the hook.”
A few moments later was when Fresno City Manager Georgeanne White laid out how the City of Fresno is captive to the private companies that create software, programs and tech that are crucial to the city’s core functions.
“They don’t have those standalone products anymore that you just upload — we’re stuck,” White told Fresnoland in a later interview. “We’re stuck because then what happens is if you don’t keep your product updated, then they stop servicing them, they stop updating them. We are trapped to a certain extent, and it just becomes the standard.”
Back in the mid-1990s, White recalls a time when she didn’t want to switch to Microsoft Word — which was new and swiftly gaining popularity at the time — after using WordPerfect for so long. She must’ve been the last person at Fresno City Hall still holding onto the older word processor, White told Fresnoland, until she couldn’t keep using it while everyone else had already moved on.
She views today’s emergence and use of artificial intelligence in a similar way. With where technological advances are going, she said it doesn’t feel like there’s much of a choice.
“You’re either going to have technology or you’re not,” White said. “We’re going to have to have technology and so we are captive — we’re absolutely captive.”
This dilemma isn’t unique to the City of Fresno. It illustrates a wider, societal impact that the emergence of artificial intelligence has had, yet another one on top of how it could affect the future of labor, or the environmental impacts of AI data centers on water, energy and even the cost of phone and computer parts like RAM.
The inevitability of AI — or at least the sense of it — has reached Fresno’s local government. City employees have been using AI products for work purposes for years. Fresno City Hall doesn’t have any formal policies establishing guardrails for how AI can and cannot be used.
Additionally, city leaders — especially most members of the Fresno City Council — don’t appear to be aware of how much the use of artificial intelligence at the city actually costs. Even fewer have an understanding of how AI impacts the way people think and solve problems — something researchers are barely making a dent in right now.
So many Fresno city employees were using OpenAI’s ChatGPT that the company reached out to city leaders, putting them on notice to pay for an enterprise subscription or stop using it entirely, White told Fresnoland.
That’s when Fresno City Hall blocked the use of ChatGPT — specifically its domain address on city servers — and instructed employees to instead use CoPilot built into Microsoft Office as an alternative.
Although there’s no formal policy regarding AI use at Fresno City Hall, White emphasized that there’s an informal policy in place already, and its just a matter of formalizing it into an administrative order.
While talking about needed guardrails, White brought up a recent legal embarrassment at an outside law firm representing the City of Fresno.
“You see what’s happening in the courts system, where lawyers are getting tripped up and sanctioned, right?” White said. “It happened to us with one of our outside counsel using an invalid citation that was likely taken from AI.”
Fresnoland obtained a city memo that lists two dozen different programs that city employees are allowed to use, which either include AI features or are entirely AI products. The memo lists projected costs for some of them, but doesn’t list actual costs in past years.
A city spokesperson told Fresnoland that the actual cost of AI programs, including Claude AI tokens, are not readily available.
According to the memo, the City of Fresno projects spending about $25,000 on Madison AI, a software that drafts internal staff reports, over the next fiscal year. They also anticipate similar costs for using the AI built into Salesforce, and also Wordly AI, which provides live transcription and Spanish translation during city council meetings.
But in terms of Claude AI, which is used by the city’s Information Services Department, its projected costs aren’t clear because it depends on usage tokens that have a separate cost. City staff didn’t list any projections for how much usage tokens would cost over the next fiscal year.
Fresno police officers use AI built into Axon’s body cameras and software to draft police reports. Although there’s no separate cost associated with the use of those AI features, the city’s $18.3 million contract with Axon is a demonstration of how costs can pile up with private companies providing software and equipment that the city is beholden to.
Although the first year of the city’s five-year contract with Axon costs $1.2 million, the third year of the contract is triple that and the fifth year will serve the city a much larger $5.8 million bill.
Is AI really inevitable? Or is it a choice?
As investments in AI proliferate, a burgeoning AI safety field has been sounding an alarm, calling for caution over the last couple years. It’s composed of scientists, engineers and researchers who’ve formed a coalition, urging tech companies to grapple with the consequences of the technology they’re developing before releasing them to the public.
Top employees and executives at OpenAI have even resigned from their posts, in protest of the company’s attitude toward developing AI tools responsibly as well as its own transparency, accountability and documentation, among many other concerns.
David Krueger, an assistant professor at the University of Montreal who studies AI, has been among the most vocal AI safety advocates in the last year. In 2025, he founded Evitable, a nonprofit organization aimed at discouraging uncritical development of AI programs and technology that could have much worse consequences than what the field has already witnessed — some of which he outlined in The Guardian.
Krueger told Fresnoland that AI poses security and privacy threats, can at times hallucinate, expeditiously agree with users in what’s referred to as sycophancy and spit out information built on gender, political or other kinds of biases.
That’s why setting clear policy on how AI is used in the workplace is important, Krueger said.
“It’s vitally important for governments to have policies on AI use, both to protect their constituents and for transparency,” Krueger told Fresnoland, adding that those kinds of policies should have ideally come first, before government employees began using AI for work or professional purposes.
He shared with Fresnoland that an AI policy should include keeping a record of all the ways AI is being used, bar any AI products that may leak private data or train data based on what’s inputted into its system. He also said a policy needs to ensure that employees are aware of the potential for AI hallucinations and sycophancy.
Krueger also shared a sobering outlook on current AI advancements: “On the current trajectory, AI will increasingly automate decision-making at every level, and take human decision-makers out of the loop. This is very dangerous and could lead to humanity losing control of our destiny.”
He said it is a choice to adopt AI technologies and workflows, but it’s also a choice to move away from them — something a few major companies have done recently. Back in May, Uber announced it had burned through its AI budget for an entire year by April, and its COO said the money it spent on AI services was getting harder to justify, according to Business Insider.
The multi-billion-dollar corporation’s executive specifically said although Uber’s tech workers were using AI more than ever before, it wasn’t translating to better features or experiences for customers.
That same month, Starbucks canceled an AI inventory tool that it rolled out to thousands of stores across the country after it frequently miscounted and mislabeled items, according to Reuters.
Much attention about how AI could transform workplaces has also focused on how the use of artificial intelligence impacts how a user thinks and processes information. An April 2026 paper published by researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania dove into how the use of AI can “supplement or even supplant” human thinking so intensely that a user will undergo what the paper termed as “cognitive surrender.”
The researchers found that with the introduction of AI into a given workflow, a user doesn’t construct an answer, but instead adopts the one provided by the AI.
Referring to artificial intelligence as System 3, the paper concluded that “people not only use System 3 to assist with reasoning, but often surrender to its outputs — whether correct or flawed.”
“We do not merely use AI; we think with it. In doing so, we must ask new questions: What happens when our judgments are shaped by minds not our own?” the researchers asked in the paper’s conclusion.
“What becomes of intuition and effort when a generative, artificial partner stands ready to answer? How do we preserve agency, reflection, and autonomy in a world where users engage in cognitive surrender?”
