United States
Assorted links for 1 October 2026
Seven links: a new complexity index finds Japan and China lead different halves of the AI-export supply chain, a 10-country survey finds most public servants already use AI while few trust their government's use of it, Uruguay's AI-readiness ranking, a Canadian policy magazine on AI flooding public consultations, Argentina and Delaware's competing proposals for AI legal personhood, a critical read of Ghana's AI strategy, and content-authenticity standards reaching consumer phones.
Assorted links for 30 September 2026
Five links: a Nigerian fintech AI-evaluation framework finds standard safety tests miss local fraud risks in both directions, India pitches its digital-infrastructure experience to the Global South at the UN, the Trump administration launches an AI front door for US federal services, Code for America and Anthropic pilot Claude for SNAP caseworkers, and Rondonia's state government adapts a wildfire-physics model for an AI early-warning system in the Amazon.
Assorted links for 28 September 2026
Six links: Stanford research finding AI companion chatbots correlate with worse wellbeing for people with small social networks, a 72-country comparison of public-sector AI registers, the UN's new Scientific Panel and Global Dialogue on AI governance, a US federal survey on AI oversight gaps, an AI-agent payment-authorization benchmark, and a CEPAL implementation guide for AI in the Latin American public sector.
Assorted links for 27 September 2026
Five links: South Africa's AI policy rewrite after an AI-hallucinated citation scandal, a mapping of US federal AI governance against sector vulnerability, African diabetic-retinopathy screening running on imperfect data, record US scam losses driving a shift to cryptographic digital identity, and an executable Governance-as-Code compliance pipeline for the EU AI Act.
Assorted links for 15 September 2026
Six links: survey collectors across 3.4 million households systematically dropping the people who cost most to reach, a World Bank survey finding 44 per cent of government AI use is individual staff working ad hoc, nominal AI GDP put at roughly $250 billion, Rwanda approving a national AI agency, Africa holding under 1 per cent of the world's data centres, and an index that scores deployability rather than capability.
Assorted links for 14 September 2026
Five links: at least 39 submissions to Australian parliamentary inquiries carrying apparently hallucinated references, a retrieval system whose recall falls from 84 to 16 per cent when a benefits question is asked in plain English, federal AI obligations reaching $7.2 billion, 300,000 hours saved by bots at the Defense Logistics Agency, and Brazil's open platform for reusable public-sector AI.
Assorted links for 5 September 2026
Nine links: safety frameworks that miss dialects and mistranslate a diagnosis, an argument about the words the field uses, a scenario for China to 2036, agent design against human oversight, what 33 parliaments say about AI and work, a New York audit, Austrian plans to automate official notices, a Colombian official on digitalised procedures, and how unevenly frontier AI exposure falls across economies.
Assorted links for 2 September 2026
Six links: six Indian digital public infrastructure systems with no forum for public participation, the IMF on cyber losses and financial stability, OpenAI pausing reinforcement learning for two weeks, where the world's data centre capacity sits, a review of 122 studies on holding language models to account, and a proposal to work out which rules apply before a system acts.
Assorted links for 1 September 2026
Five links: four scenarios for an AI economy, the 10 trillion won South Korea put behind a free public AI service, where the largest open models are built, what six months of use does to a working pattern, and what workshop participants feared disclosure would cost them.
Assorted links for 31 August 2026
Nine links: what two frontier labs now book in a year, the three figures a Mexican court got when it asked three chatbots the same question, what a smaller model does when it is handed skills another model worked out, an 825 million euro fine with no AI in it.
Assorted links for 29 August 2026
Nine links: which of England's two planning AI tools is actually live, what MIT's committee found had changed on campus in under three years, an Ebola nowcast in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the first evaluation of a proprietary model by someone who never saw its weights.
Assorted links for 27 August 2026
Eleven links: what METR found inside OpenAI's agent incident, what an IMF paper puts on the table for African growth, where India sits per head rather than in total, and a Brazilian committee text that requires human supervision and authorises facial recognition in the same breath.
A new gov.uk benchmark finds chatbots usually answer well and almost never say I don't know
Researchers generated 22,066 questions from 2,781 gov.uk pages and tested 11 models on them, scoring each answer claim by claim against the page. Most answers were good, a small tail of bad misses drags the averages down, every model volunteered more than the page held, and almost none ever refused to answer.
The government share in Pew's AI-writing study is about five flagged pages out of 669
Pew ran an AI-detection model over nearly 490,000 web pages and found ten times more AI writing on commercial domains than on government ones. The government figure everyone will quote is drawn from 669 sampled pages, and it has been falling since 2024 while every other domain rises.
A register of government algorithms can only hold what the state bought
Almost every country now has an AI policy, so that count has stopped telling anyone apart. The measure that has not saturated is whether a government must disclose the algorithms it runs itself, and procurement caps how much of it a register could ever reach.
Using AI to write public comments improves every comment without closing the education gap
A survey experiment on US rulemaking found that ChatGPT made public comments easier to write and much better rated, without making people understand the rule any better. Agencies are now using the same models to read the comments.
African developers chose Chinese models before any government signed anything
Ten African countries signed an AI pact with China in Shanghai in July. The adoption it looks like it caused had already happened, in the hands of developers who could download the weights while the American onboarding queue was still running.
OpenAI published two datasets on ChatGPT use and neither covers the public sector
OpenAI publishes two datasets on how ChatGPT is used, one for individuals and one for enterprises, and the public sector that it counts in the millions when selling appears in neither.
New Jersey's AI strategy is a staffing list
Three of the four disciplines New Jersey's innovation office employs exist to decide what to build. Most governments adopting AI employ none of them.
Lots of procurement, limited learning
Federal agencies doubled their AI buying and kept no record of what they learned.
Europe regulates the digital world and keeps tripping in the physical one
I just came back from Frankfurt, and I spent an unhealthy amount of time talking about digital policies while looking at stairs.
The first clinical trial of a generative AI therapy chatbot
The first clinical trial of a generative AI therapy chatbot, from Dartmouth in NEJM AI: 51% average reduction in depression symptoms, 31% in generalised anxiety, 19% in eating-disorder concerns.
Agents for the few, queues for the many – or agents for all?
Closing the public services divide by regulating for AI's opportunities.