service-delivery
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 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 29 September 2026
Four links: Kenya and Anthropic sign a data-sovereignty AI framework at UNGA, Goa puts its state government portal behind a WhatsApp chatbot, a 118-student study finds generative AI's learning effect depends on how it is used, and a Brazilian legal commentary traces today's AI-governance gap to a 2017 audit of un-shared government data.
No AI safety index caught a chatbot mistranslating smallpox as syphilis
AI safety evaluation budgets concentrate in a handful of Western labs testing for model-level risks, while deployment failures in low-resource languages go untested until a user reports the harm, including a Tigrinya medical chatbot that rendered smallpox as syphilis and gonorrhea as diabetes.
ITU's GENIE.AI is an open-source AI stack now piloting in four countries
ITU assembled GENIE.AI from existing open-source tools -- OPEA, Docling, IBM Granite and Google Gemma -- so governments can run AI services without depending on one vendor. Pilots are already live in Lesotho, the Gambia and Bangladesh, with a fourth under way in El Salvador.
Access to an AI assistant built on World Bank reports saved no significant time
Researchers deployed an AI assistant restricted to a curated library of World Bank reports to more than 2,200 professionals across 116 countries. Its refusal rate fell from between 40 and 70 percent in its early weeks to under 10 percent once the library grew from about 50 reports to over 4,000, and the broader experiment found no significant time savings for the overall group given access.
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.
Five of 475 studies on surgical AI in poorer countries came from low-income countries
A scoping review gathered 475 studies of artificial intelligence in surgical care across low-income and middle-income countries. 305 came from China, five came from low-income countries, and 12 reported reaching a real patient care pathway.
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.
Brazil found AI in 94% of its judicial bodies and 55% of the branch that runs the services
The same survey asked where the technology sits, and at every level of government it is about twice as likely to be working on the administration's own processes as on anything delivered to a citizen.
The evidence on agents flooding public services comes from eleven rich countries and Brazil
This site noted the agentic flooding paper on 21 August. What that line left out is where the paper looked, and the menu it offers has a column not every treasury can pay for.
A rule written for one market became a property of the tool everyone else uses
Brussels wrote AI transparency rules for its own market. The mark now travels with the tool everywhere, and the people it reaches had no part in either decision. The objection is jurisdictional, not to the rule.
Indonesia's welfare redesign lets people dispute what the state's records say they own
In one Indonesian district, more than 9,000 people used a new appeals channel to correct what the government's records said about them. That number counts errors found, not yet errors fixed.
AI can explain a public service far better than it can reach one, across 166 countries
RADAR finds AI can describe public services far better than it can reach them. The repair is stable URLs and sensible bot policies, which is exactly why it will take a decade and why it looks like infrastructure.
The Vallance opportunity: agents read what screen readers read
Britain built the world's most admired government website and skipped the platform beneath it. The agentic wave is a second offer, on one condition.
Government services are over-represented in AI conversations by a factor of almost twenty
Google's ATLAS report, drawn from nearly 15 million Gemini interactions, finds government-services queries over-represented by roughly twenty times their share of American time-use hours. People are already using AI as an unofficial interface to the state.
The logic of lines, from Florence to the digital queue
Having spent my younger life in Florence, I always had an interest in the logic of lines. At first, and like most tourists, I treated queues as outsourced discernment: after all, so many strangers could not all be wrong.
Summer in Europe while you can: AI and the Jevons paradox might soon make it unbearable
Biometrics lowered the administrative cost of designing new entry requirements, which removed the natural brake on regulatory ambition. The efficiency gain was immediately consumed by the expanded scope of what became feasible to demand.
This may not be the future, but it is what citizens will expect
I'm not sure that's what the future will look like, but it is what citizens will expect from governments. Whether those in power like it or not.
An RCT on patient-facing medical AI, and what it measured
A randomised trial in China (n = 2,069), published in Nature Medicine, tested an LLM chatbot that conducts the patient intake interview before a specialist visit and hands the clinician a structured summary.
Public services will not be shaped by the interface alone
About a year ago, Luke Jordan and I argued that the future of public services would not be shaped only by user interfaces, but by agents acting on behalf of users.
What we do not say enough about govtech
At the Data Science Conference, I had a conversation with Gustavo Maia from Colab about something we don't say enough in tech: if you want to build things that actually reach people, look at the public sector.
Most digital government life events are theatre
Most digital government “life events” are just theater. Time to admit it. Digital government folks love to talk about “life events”: having a baby, starting a business, losing a job.
Asking for automation agents that actually get things done
Asking the community: any examples, public or private sector, of automation agents that actually get things done for users online?
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.
How to make AI agents serve everyone, not just the privileged few
Written with Luke Jordan: as AI agents reshape access to public services, the risk is a widening gap between citizens who can delegate and those who cannot. What it would take to build the equitable version instead.
Agents for the few, queues for the many – or agents for all?
Closing the public services divide by regulating for AI's opportunities.