procurement
An AI model now reads Brazil's messy $75 billion medicine-procurement records
Brazil's public health system buys $75 billion of medicine a year through 263 different local systems with unstandardised records. A large language model now matches each purchase to a federal product code, cutting a 90-minute manual task to five seconds and lifting the match rate from 5% to 80%.
Assorted links for 6 September 2026
Five links: why the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident was configuration rather than emergence, the biggest year on record for UK public sector AI contracts, a WhatsApp chatbot that ran participatory budgeting in Bogota, Korean smart-city pilots in Brunei and the Philippines, and the governance frameworks that miss Shadow AI.
The score can be the shortcut
Five researchers audited 2,385 evaluation traces across 15 agent benchmarks and asked whether the scores measure the skill the benchmark is named after. On two of the fifteen they found protocol exposures and reward hacking in about two thirds of what they examined, while five audited cohorts contained no positive trace.
Brazil and Portugal account for about 69% of Portuguese dataset records
Twenty researchers built the first country-level atlas of who is represented in the datasets behind language models. Brazil and Portugal hold about 69% of the Portuguese records, France, Switzerland and Canada about 63% of the French, and 121 of 197 countries have ten or fewer records attributed to them at all.
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.
Vietnam's AI scoring sheet puts sixty-five of a hundred marks on doing the work
Vietnam's criteria for public-service AI platforms, in force since 19 June, mark a platform out of 100. Thirty-five marks are for compliance and sixty-five are labelled for the sector's own work. What those marks reward is not published, so the split between the two blocks is all the ministry has disclosed.
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.
Estonia is committing to buy AI compute that no supplier has built yet
Britain used procurement to open its digital market, and 90% of G-Cloud's suppliers are SMEs taking 44% of the money. Estonia is trying the harder version, a forward purchase commitment to attract a supplier that is not there yet.
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.
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.
Open budgets, and what AI changes about what we can see
Open budgets and open data may not be at their fashionable peak, but AI changes what we can see in the data, and what we cannot.
Help needed: what agentic procurement would actually require
Help needed! I've been tinkering with an interactive 'periodic table' for AI in government for a course I'm developing.
Buy or build, and the question that decides it
Buy or build? One trajectory from ambition to pragmatism is worth a thousand AI strategies. Singapore's SEA-LION AI model started by pretraining from scratch.
How AI reshapes buyer-supplier negotiations
Very interesting study (link in comments) on how AI reshapes buyer–supplier negotiations. In experiments with students and professional negotiators, human suppliers negotiated with a ChatGPT-based agent acting as the buyer.
Why would a government adopt this? The question public-sector AI keeps skipping
One of the recurring blind spots in public sector AI enthusiasm is a failure to answer a basic question: Why would governments succeed with GenAI now, given their long history of struggling to adopt much simpler technologies?
The procurement problem nobody wants to own
*Excellent* analysis on UK procurement challenges. The findings also resonate strongly with what we see in developing economies, but where there's an additional structural barrier: payment delays.