Starting today, civil servants in Sweden’s top government body can’t open ChatGPT or Claude in their browsers anymore.
Sweden’s Government Offices, the Regeringskansliet, which supports the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministries, is blocking the web interfaces of both AI services on staff computers from 26 October. Sveriges Radio’s news programme Ekot first reported the plan on 23 October.
Staff are being sent to Microsoft Copilot instead. According to SVT, the Government Offices approved Copilot after a review and raised its security settings as a result. In an email to SVT, the Government Offices said every employee has access to Microsoft’s AI tool, and that colleagues can still reach the ChatGPT and Claude language models through Intric, an AI platform it uses internally. So this isn’t a ban on the models themselves. It’s a ban on using the consumer websites.
The reasoning is about contracts and data. Decrypt reports that Mikael Wettercrantz, the Government Offices’ director of digitalisation, wrote on the staff intranet that using AI services without a formal contract can have consequences for information security. He also said there had been several examples of problematic use, both in how sensitive the information entered was and in how AI-generated answers were handled.
Sweden isn’t starting from zero here. SVT notes that the Swedish Tax Agency and the National Board of Institutional Care have already put similar blocks in place, and the Swedish Enforcement Authority is considering one.
There’s an interesting wrinkle too. Decrypt points out that Microsoft added Claude models to Copilot earlier this year, though in the EU they’re off by default and need an administrator to switch them on. The Government Offices hasn’t said whether its Copilot setup has Claude enabled, so the line between the blocked AI and the approved AI may be blurrier than it looks.
Why it matters
This is a clear example of where workplace AI is heading: not ‘AI or no AI’, but ‘which AI, under which contract’. Organisations want the productivity, but they want to know where their data goes and who can see it. If your team uses free AI chat tools for work, now’s a good time to set a simple policy: which tools are approved, what data must never be pasted in, and who reviews AI output before it goes out. Getting that right early saves a lot of pain later.
Sources: SVT Nyheter, Decrypt. Written by the xRapid Media LLP team.
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