Maryland taps AI for housing and government benefits (www.axios.com)

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore announced a partnership with Anthropic and Percepta to deploy AI tools across state agencies to speed access to government benefits and accelerate housing permitting. Anthropic’s Claude model will power chatbots to help residents apply for food aid, Medicaid and temporary cash assistance, surface other programs they may qualify for, and serve as a decision-support tool for caseworkers verifying eligibility or navigating complex policy questions. Percepta will implement a software platform to streamline permitting and licensing for housing development. The Rockefeller Foundation provided funding, and the effort builds on Maryland’s existing AI-driven food assistance work. The move is notable because it represents a large-scale, state-level adoption of commercial LLMs for frontline public services—promising faster application processing, reduced administrative burden, and data-driven targeting (Anthropic and the governor’s team are also building analytics to map local needs). Maryland says usage will follow its “responsible AI” policy, and officials plan an AI upskilling pilot for early-career workers. Key implications include operational efficiency gains, new workflows where caseworkers rely on LLM assistance, and governance questions around privacy, bias, and auditability that the state’s oversight framework will need to address.