A Draft Rule Would Require Model Cards for Any AI Sold to Government

A draft procurement rule circulating among four national ICT ministries would require any AI system sold into government to ship with a standardized model card: training data provenance at the source-category level, documented evaluation results on named benchmarks, known failure modes, and a named accountable party at the vendor.

The mechanism is procurement rather than legislation, which is precisely why it is moving quickly. No parliament has to pass anything; a ministry simply adds a clause to its standard terms. Officials in two of the four countries told Afrikons they expect to adopt some version before the end of the fiscal year.

"Procurement rules are the most underrated regulatory instrument we have," said Nadia Farouk, a technology lawyer advising one of the drafting committees. "Government is the largest single buyer of software on this continent. If it insists on documentation, it gets documentation. No court required."

Vendors are contesting the definitions rather than the principle. The current draft requires disclosure of training-data source categories, which several multinational suppliers have argued is commercially sensitive and, for models they license rather than build, not something they can produce at all. How that argument resolves will determine whether the rule is a genuine transparency floor or a checkbox with a legal disclaimer attached.