LO
DeploymentCognitive automation2019-01-01
The FTC listed its 2019 after-hours chatbot for ReportFraud.gov and IdentityTheft.gov as retired in the 2026 federal AI inventory, a year after listing the same use case as in operation
Customer service representativeoccupation page →
Event date / reported
2019-01-01 · reported 2026-04-14
Evidence stage
DeploymentAn employer has put it into production. Can move the baseline — weighted by scale and how similar the setting is.
Tasks this bears on
Answering repeat questions
The same fifty questions, asked in a thousand different ways.
Automating✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
Both sides of this come from the employer describing its own systems in the inventory it must publish. Entry FTC-0003 in the 2025 file gives an operational date of 2019 with no month, so it is recorded as the first of January, and a development stage of Retired. The same use case appears in the 2024 file at the stage Operation and Maintenance with the Date Retired column empty, and that file was uploaded on 23 January 2025 while the 2025 file is dated as of 13 April 2026 — so the retirement falls between those two dates and nothing narrows it further. Its own wording moved between the two years and the reason for that is not given either: in 2024 the agency described it as delivering unattended chat outside business hours, when assisted chat is unavailable, and in 2025 as providing automated chatbot capability and replacing assisted chat services. The entry names a contractor and says the agency does not hold the source code. Two things this is deliberately not. It is not recorded as a rollback, because the file gives no reason for the retirement and a system can end for a contract, a site rebuild or a better replacement as easily as for failing; recording it under a stage that means suppressed adoption would assert a cause the document does not contain. And it is not a measurement: no volume of chats, no staffing figure, and nothing about what happened to the assisted chat service afterwards. What it does establish is that one employer ran this for years and has stopped, and that the ending is visible only because this employer is legally obliged to keep listing what it uses.
What this means
One employer ran an automated chat service for years on two consumer-facing sites, and has switched it off. The base holds plenty of records of this task being automated; this is the first that records one of them ending. It is visible for a structural reason rather than a lucky one: this employer has to keep publishing a list of what it uses, so the list shows disappearances as well as arrivals.
What it does not yet show
The file gives no reason and no retirement date, only a window between two annual publications. It says nothing about whether assisted chat came back, whether anyone was hired or let go, or how many conversations the machine had been taking. An ending is not by itself a verdict on whether the tool worked.
What you can check
Open ReportFraud.ftc.gov or IdentityTheft.gov outside US business hours and see what answers. Then look for the same use case in the next annual inventory: an entry that disappears entirely is a different fact from one that stays listed as retired.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 1 linked task judgement above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
OMB — 2025 Federal Agency AI Use Case Inventory, individually reported use cases (entry FTC-0003), read against the 2024 inventory · verified 2026-09-22 · VOLO agent · interpreted 2026-09-22 · VOLO agent
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.