City Detect has been named to the City and County of San Francisco's new Emerging Technologies Prequalified Vendor Pool, one of fewer than 100 firms selected after a detailed screening process.

San Francisco's questionnaire draws on the City of San Jose's AI Factsheet, used to vet vendors for the GovAI Coalition. The GovAI Coalition, a national effort that brings together more than 1,000 organizations and 350 agencies to define what responsible AI should look like in local government. The Factsheet provides real structure for vetting an AI vendor, rather than relying on marketing claims. Firms have to document how their models are trained and tested, how bias is identified and managed, what data protection certifications they hold, and even the environmental footprint of running the technology in production.

City Detect was an early applicant and approved vendor in the GovAI Coalition's initial 2024 vetting, and we continue to support the coalition's work. We held ourselves to that same standard when we submitted our response to San Francisco's Emerging Technologies RFQ.

Neither the vetting standards for the San Francisco RFQ nor the GovAI Factsheet were new territory for us. Our Responsible AI Strategy commits us to a short list of concrete practices: we don't share jurisdiction data with third parties, we blur faces and license plates by default, every detection goes through human review before any action is taken, our computation and storage stay within the United States, an independent SOC 2 audit verifies our security and data handling every year, and we don't earn revenue based on how many detections lead to formal action.

We're looking forward to working with departments across the City and County of San Francisco to streamline urban blight detection. It builds on the work we're already doing across California, in Stockton, Lancaster, Rancho Cordova, Cathedral City, and beyond.