The Securities and Exchange Commission used a proprietary algorithm to spot suspicious trading that will soon send a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker to prison.

That case is only one example of the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence across the U.S. government. About half of the top 100 regulatory agencies are now using one or more types of AI to carry out their daily work, according to researchers from Stanford and New York universities who are cataloging its use and expect to publish their findings later this year.

For now, “in very few instances have we observed algorithms truly displacing the final exercise of human discretion by agency employees or officials,” said Daniel Ho, law professor at Stanford Law School and one of the team leaders working on the project for the Administrative Conference of the U.S. But AI is pointing the way to using “historical agency data’’ to predict real-world behaviors.

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The algorithm being piloted by the PTO could take the World Wildlife Fund panda logo, for example, and search for similar marks from disparate data sets, coming back with a ranked set of possible matches, said David Engstrom, law professor at Stanford Law School also working on the ACUS project.

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“It could be a better tool and yet it could be subject to gaming,” Engstrom said. “Better-heeled members of the regulated community may be able to reverse engineer the tool and figure out what the agency is doing, and then duck enforcement,” he said.

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