TRAX International Corp. v. United States

What happened

TRAX International Corp. v. United States, No. 26-796, is a post-award bid protest. TRAX challenged the Army's award of a mission support services contract at the White Sands Missile Range to Southwest Range Services, LLC, which intervened. Among other claims, TRAX alleged that the Army's technical evaluation contained AI "hallucinations" that made the awardee's proposal look stronger.

The government's first account, supported by two declarations, was that a procurement analyst had been asked to assess the FAST TRACK AI platform "to determine whether it could be used in future source selections", and in doing so generated outputs for all three offerors. Only the output for a third offeror, not a party, was displayed on a screen to the Source Selection Evaluation Board. The board concluded it "[was] not useable and could not be used as a reliable tool."

The court then ordered the declarants to answer specific questions. In a supplemental declaration, the analyst "acknowledged for the first time that he had shared the AI summaries with three individuals". Two of them were evaluation board members, one of whom was also the contracting officer. The supplemental declarations nonetheless said no board member or decisionmaker had seen the AI evaluations of the TRAX and SRS proposals.

What the court did

Judge Carolyn N. Lerner granted TRAX's motion to complete the record in two steps, on July 7 and July 10, and ordered all three FAST TRACK evaluations filed. Her Opinion and Order, filed under seal on September 3 and reissued with redactions on September 22 as ECF 76, explained that the outputs were generated and considered during the procurement, and that whether the board found them useful "has no bearing on whether it was considered."

With the record complete, the court found that the board's evaluation of the third offeror contained "multiple passages nearly identical, sentence for sentence, to the AI-generated evaluation of the proposal." As to TRAX and SRS, the overlap was minimal. The opinion states: "While the Court cannot entirely rule out the use of AI in assessing the proposals, more is needed to support TRAX's argument that the SSEB over-relied on AI such that the entire evaluation became arbitrary and capricious." TRAX identified no evaluation error it could trace to AI. The court denied TRAX's motion and granted judgment on the administrative record to the government and the intervenor.

A separate order, sealed on September 11 and reissued on October 5 as ECF 79, directed Justice Department and Army counsel to show cause under RCFC 11 why they should not be sanctioned for factual misrepresentations. On the government's claim that no AI output was used, it said: "It strains credulity that this degree of overlap could be coincidental." Among nine questions, the order in TRAX required counsel to:

• identify who generated the incomplete record and why the FAST TRACK documents were omitted;
• identify everyone who drafted or approved the original and supplemental declarations;
• state what was done to verify them before filing;
• explain the overlap between the board's evaluation and the FAST TRACK summary.

Where it stands

The response was due on or before October 5. At the August hearing, government counsel apologized and said he had not known the recipients were board members. No resolution of the show-cause order was public as of October 21, and whether TRAX has appealed the judgment was not located. The court has not found that AI drove the evaluation of TRAX or SRS.

The obligation it engaged

Clause 8 of the Standard, disclosure, is the first clause TRAX engages: AI outputs made during the procurement surfaced only after the protester pressed for them, and the government offered what the court called "a shifting and, at times, inaccurate account" of who saw them. Clause 7, contemporaneous record, is what would have answered the court's questions about distribution. Clause 2, non-delegation, applies to evaluation text the court found nearly identical to AI output. Clause 6, custody and confidentiality, is engaged because offerors' proposals were processed through an AI platform outside the evaluation itself; the opinion does not address that point.

The lesson for an expert witness is direct. Running case material through a tool, even only to test the tool, creates output that may be treated as considered. An expert should log every such run, who received the output and when, and should confirm that log before signing any declaration about who saw what.

Sources

• U.S. Court of Federal Claims · September 22, 2026
  Opinion and Order (reissued with redactions), ECF 76
• U.S. Court of Federal Claims · October 5, 2026
  Order to Show Cause (reissued with redactions), ECF 79

What could not be confirmed

The names of the analyst, board members, contracting officer and the counsel directed to respond are redacted and are not given here. The government's show-cause response, any ruling on it and any appeal of the judgment were not located as of 2026-10-21. The court did not find that AI output was relied on in evaluating TRAX or SRS.