The Wall Street Journal first reported that on May 21, 2026, the US Department of Health and Human Services launched the AERO program — Audit Enforcement and Risk Oversight — which uses ChatGPT to scan at least five years of annual audit reports from every state, local government, and nonprofit spending more than $1 million in federal funds annually. HHS estimates between $100 billion and $200 billion in annual fraudulent or wasteful spending. States that fail to resolve flagged deficiencies may lose federal funding. The program runs on off-the-shelf commercial ChatGPT rather than a custom procured tool, bypassing standard federal acquisition processes. Critics have raised concerns about AI error rates in complex financial documents and whether enforcement has been applied evenhandedly across states.