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TRAX International v. United States: who saw the AI evaluations
TRAX International Corp. v. The United States, and Southwest Range Services, LLC, No. 26-796 · Judge Carolyn N. Lerner · Opinion and Order filed under seal 3 September 2026, reissued 22 September 2026 · Order to Show Cause filed under seal 11 September 2026, reissued 5 October 2026
Both orders read as reissued with the parties’ agreed redactions, shown by the court as [***]; every quotation is from them. Source: the Court of Federal Claims’ own public document service.
The Army used FAST TRACK, an AI platform, to produce evaluations of the three proposals for a mission support contract at White Sands Missile Range. The court ordered all three AI evaluations into the administrative record because they were “relevant to the process” of the decision, and found one board evaluation contained passages “nearly identical, sentence for sentence” to the AI version. It denied the protest. It then ordered named Department of Justice and Army counsel to show cause why they should not be sanctioned: declarations had said no decisionmaker saw the AI evaluations of two offerors, and two sitting board members, one of them the Contracting Officer, had received them.
Status
- 10 Jul 2026The court granted the protester’s motion to complete the administrative record with all three AI-generated evaluations.
- 3 Sep 2026Opinion and Order: the protest is denied, and the Government’s and the awardee’s cross-motions for judgment on the administrative record are granted. Reissued with redactions on 22 September 2026.
- 11 Sep 2026Order to Show Cause to named Government counsel under the court’s Rule 11(b)(3) and (4). Reissued with redactions on 5 October 2026.
- Not decidedWhether any sanction will be imposed. The order asks counsel to answer; it decides nothing against them.
The AI evaluations belong in the record
A procurement analyst had been asked to assess whether FAST TRACK could be used in future source selections, and produced AI outputs for all three offerors. The court held they had to be before it:
“The AI evaluations are ‘relevant to the process’ by which the Army made its decision”
With the record complete, the overlap appeared:
“With the record complete, it became apparent that the SSEB’s evaluation of [***] contained multiple passages nearly identical, sentence for sentence, to the AI-generated evaluation of the proposal.”
That was not enough to win. The overlap with the protester’s and the awardee’s evaluations was minimal, and the court said: “While the Court cannot entirely rule out the use of AI in assessing the proposals, more is needed to support TRAX’s argument that the SSEB over-relied on AI such that the entire evaluation became arbitrary and capricious.”
Who saw them: the order to show cause
The Government had told the court that the only AI output the board viewed was for an offeror not party to the case, displayed on a screen, and that none of the AI reports were used in the decision. After the court asked specific questions, supplemental declarations said the AI evaluations of the two parties had been shared with three people, none of them decisionmakers. Two of the three were board members, one of them also the Contracting Officer.
“Twice, the Government filed declarations which omitted the fact that sitting SSEB members (and the CO) had received the AI-generated evaluations the Government represented no decisionmaker had seen.”
Counsel must now identify who generated the incomplete record, why the FAST TRACK documents were left out, and every person who drafted, reviewed or approved each declaration.
Why it is on this list
An AI output entered a federal procurement decision, and the dispute turned on facts nobody could show from a record made at the time: which AI evaluations existed, who received them, when, and whether a decisionmaker had seen them. The answers came from declarations, and the declarations were incomplete twice.
The court treated the AI outputs as part of the record of the decision, and the question of who saw them as one Government counsel must answer under Rule 11.
Sources
- TRAX International Corp. v. United States, No. 26-796 (Fed. Cl.), Opinion and Order, reissued 22 September 2026, read at the court’s own document service
- TRAX International Corp. v. United States, No. 26-796 (Fed. Cl.), Order to Show Cause, reissued 5 October 2026, read at the court’s own document service
Related
- The law library
- Villanueva v. LVMPD, an expert’s ChatGPT history log in discovery
- The sanctions record
Checked against both orders. Information, not legal advice.
Information, not legal advice. Every entry is verified against the issuing body’s own document; where a source is reporting rather than the document, we say so.