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1 1 (May 5, 2026)

handle is hein.crs/goveujd0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Artificial Intelligence and the Fourth Amendment: Two Emerging Legal Issues May 5, 2026 Various law enforcement components at the federal, state, and local levels report using artificial intelligence (AI) for some functions. Legislatures at the state and federal level have considered a variety of proposals relevant to the intersection of law enforcement, crime, and Al. Legal commentary has focused on the potential impact ofAl on criminal justice, including everything from the admissibility of Al evidence, to sentencing, to Al-powered robot police officers, to the Fourth Amendment. Precise conceptualizations ofAl vary, but the FBI has used the definition from the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. That legislation defines Al to include, among other things, artificial systems designed to think or act like a human, or that perform[] tasks under varying and unpredictable circumstances without significant human oversight, or that can learn from experience and improve performance when exposed to data sets. Another federal statute defines Al as a machine-based system that can, for a given set ofhuman-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments and that uses human or machine inputs to perceive environments, abstract its perceptions, and thereby formulate options for information or action. This Legal Sidebar focuses on the potential Fourth Amendment implications of Al in two contexts. The first pertains to law enforcement seeking to obtain data generated from consumer use of Al products such as chatbot conversation histories and related data. The second context involves law enforcement use of surveillance tools augmented with AL, with a particular focus on Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). This Legal Sidebar begins with a brief overview of Fourth Amendment concepts relevant to both topics and concludes with considerations for Congress. For a list of additional CRS products covering other aspects ofAL, see CRS Insight IN12458, Artificial Intelligence: CRSProducts, by Laurie Harris and Rachael D. Roan (2025). The Fourth Amendment and Al The Fourth Amendment imposes limits on searches and seizures by the government. Courts have determined that a Fourth Amendment search occurs if the Government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area or when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable. With respect to the seizure of property, that occurs Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB11429 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress