"Axon’s Draft One Is Designed to Defy Transparency" 10 July 2025

Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public, an EFF investigation has found.

Our review of public records from police agencies already using the technology — including police reports, emails, procurement documents, department policies, software settings, and more — as well as Axon’s own user manuals and marketing materials revealed that it’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer.

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Draft One uses a ChatGPT variant to process body-worn camera audio of public encounters and create police reports based only on the captured verbal dialogue; it does not process the video. The Draft One-generated text is sprinkled with bracketed placeholders that officers are encouraged to add additional observations or information—or can be quickly deleted. Officers are supposed to edit Draft One's report and correct anything the Gen AI misunderstood due to a lack of context, troubled translations, or just plain-old mistakes. When they're done, the officer is prompted to sign an acknowledgement that the report was generated using Draft One and that they have reviewed the report and made necessary edits to ensure it is consistent with the officer’s recollection. Then they can copy and paste the text into their report. When they close the window, the draft disappears.

Any new, untested, and problematic technology needs a robust process to evaluate its use by officers. In this case, one would expect police agencies to retain data that ensures officers are actually editing the AI-generated reports as required, or that officers can accurately answer if a judge demands to know whether, or which part of, reports used by the prosecution were written by AI. 

One would expect audit systems to be readily available to police supervisors, researchers, and the public, so that anyone can make their own independent conclusions. And one would expect that Draft One would make it easy to discern its AI product from human product – after all, even your basic, free word processing software can track changes and save a document history.

But Draft One defies all these expectations, offering meager oversight features that deliberately conceal how it is used. 

So when a police report includes biased language, inaccuracies, misinterpretations, or even outright lies, the record won't indicate whether the officer or the AI is to blame. That makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assess how the system affects justice outcomes, because there is little non-anecdotal data from which to determine whether the technology is junk.