Model validation requires disclosure of control and training sets, seed sets, and an elusion validation sample to the FTC at least two weeks before compliance, with a duty to retrain if deficiencies are found and to supplement productions if the review changes.

There is no supplemental responsiveness review that would allow manual review or search terms to exclude documents identified as responsive by TAR/AI, except for identifying privileged or sensitive information.

Overall, these rules deepen FTC oversight of TAR/AI reviews, likely increasing time and burden, potentially delaying compliance and pushing parties toward traditional search methods or negotiated modifications.

If AI is used, parties must disclose prompts, relevance scores, and document rationales, raising concerns about attorney work product protection.

No pre-culling of the data population via analytics before deduplication or TAR/AI unless the FTC approves the process.

Collections must be complete from all custodians before training begins, delaying TAR/AI initiation and potentially favoring newer approaches that don’t require full custodian collections.

The FTC issued investigational subpoenas with new, stringent requirements for using AI-assisted review or TAR in Civil Investigative Demands and merger Second Requests.

Prescriptive performance metrics are required, including recall at 95% confidence of at least 75%, precision of at least 75%, and a disclosed cutoff score no less than 0.50, with acknowledgement of a tradeoff between precision and recall.

Parties must provide a calendar of anticipated productions within a week of training, detailing dates and volumes of rolling productions, bringing FTC involvement into production scheduling.

Expansive upfront disclosures must be filed at least one week before model training, covering technology, review workflow, SMEs, document types, exclusions, AI tools and models, and AI-versus-human agreement rates for a valid sample.

Practical implications: parties may seek to negotiate terms with the FTC or proceed under non-compliant justifications to avoid these requirements, though that risks substantial compliance disputes in Second Requests.