The Department of Homeland Security is swiftly following through on the White House's October order to harness and safeguard the use of artificial intelligence across government platforms, most notably in the fight against the fentanyl epidemic.

The department's growing use of AI has been most noteworthy at the nation's southern border, where federal customs officers must expeditiously scan vehicles and commercial traffic to process legal trade but stop illegal substances, such as fentanyl, from coming in undetected, according to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who spoke at the Axios AI+ Summit in Washington on Tuesday.

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"Our Office of Field Operations at U.S. Customs and Border Protection is using AI to detect unusual travel patterns of vehicles crossing the border, and in 1.4 seconds, we identified an anomaly of a particular truck that ended up having about 75 kilograms of narcotics in it, so that type of machine learning was extraordinarily useful in the border context," Mayorkas said onstage during a conversation with Axios reporter Ina Fried.

The dozens of ports on the U.S.-Mexico border are ground zero for stopping fentanyl from making it into the country. Nearly 90% of the 27,023 pounds of fentanyl that CBP seized at the nation's borders in fiscal 2023 occurred at ports of entry as opposed to between the ports of entry or at Border Patrol highway checkpoints, according to CBP data publicly released in October.

More than 6 billion possibly lethal doses of fentanyl were seized by federal law enforcement at the border over the past year, enough to kill all 330 million people 18 times.

The AI can alert officers to "anomalies" in trucks or passenger vehicles where drugs are concealed.

But AI is also being proven useful in other homeland security realms.

"We are looking at AI in the wide array of fields," Mayorkas said. "The one that comes immediately to mind where we are just starting is in the context of extreme weather events and the ability to analyze patterns in weather developments where we can be — have greater predictive capabilities of where wildfires, for example, can occur."

AI has also been quickly implemented in operations at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit organization created by Congress. The DHS has used AI to take pictures of a child and render what he or she would look like after a decade, then pass those prediction images to relevant law enforcement agencies that are searching for the missing person.

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"We've actually recovered children, victims of abduction and exploitation, through that age progression methodology. It's actually remarkable," Mayorkas said. "[It] assists law enforcement identifying, rescuing that child."

President Joe Biden tasked DHS last month with creating standards for the use of AI in government and the private sector to ensure privacy, equity, and civil rights as the technology swiftly expands.