NEOS challenge Vorarlberg’s AI platform over strategy and safeguards

Vorarlberg’s artificial intelligence platform cost about €85,000 to introduce and will cost nearly €130,000 a year to run, but the state set no measurable targets for it. The figures, disclosed in response to a NEOS inquiry, have prompted the party to question the project’s strategy and value, ORF reports.

The state administration has used the platform, known as VOKI, since late September. It is intended to help staff write and summarise documents and translate text. Soon after its launch, it wrongly identified former state governor Herbert Sausgruber and state councillor Martina Rüscher as members of other parties. Both are members of the ÖVP.

VOKI also refused to answer questions about the 1989 massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The state recently told ORF Vorarlberg that it takes possible distortions or restrictions in a language model seriously.

According to the state’s response, there was no cost-benefit analysis before the platform was introduced. Officials said they had deliberately avoided general numerical targets for saving time, staff or money, because results would depend on each use case.

NEOS parliamentary leader Claudia Gamon said the cost was within range for a project of this kind, but argued that the lack of a clear strategy raised doubts about whether the money had been well spent. She said measurable goals were particularly important for a project intended to improve public administration.

VOKI uses Qwen, a model developed by Chinese technology company Alibaba. The state said it had not altered the model through fine-tuning or changes to its weights. It had also considered the European model Mistral and models from OpenAI, but selected Qwen for its language quality, performance and technical integration.

Gamon rejected the argument that keeping data on state-owned servers addressed concerns about the model’s origins. “A Chinese model does not become European just because it runs on your own servers. The censorship is in the model, not the hardware,” she said in a written statement.

The state’s response said the platform allows the model to be changed at any time with little technical effort. NEOS said it hoped Vorarlberg would switch to a European provider.

State Governor Markus Wallner said the purchase was approved in December 2025 and the hardware ordered the following day. The Federal Chancellery presented its Public AI initiative to Vorarlberg in July 2026. Wallner cited the timing to explain why the state had not waited for the federal solution, GovGPT.