state-capacity
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.
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.
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.
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.
AI trials involve governments less often than trials in general
Five researchers tracked AI interventions across two trial registries from 2019 into a partial 2026. AI is on track to make up one in five registered trials, up from one in thirty in under four years, the average planned AI trial runs 11.3 months, and AI trials in the AEA registry are government-related 10.7 per cent of the time against 14.1 per cent for trials overall.
Assorted links for 7 September 2026
Seven links: a European Commission expert review on AI's divides across member states, infrastructure for governing AI agents, a paediatric chest X-ray model whose sensitivity falls from 95.1 to 6.2 per cent across countries, smartphone oral cancer screening in India, AI policy priorities across Africa, a benchmark for simulating governance policy, and Nigeria's sovereign AI agenda at GITEX.
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.
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.
Half these jurisdictions have no AI law of their own
Five researchers pulled 382 provisions out of 101 legal instruments across twenty jurisdictions that build no frontier AI model. Only 22 per cent sit in binding law, half the jurisdictions hold no domestic instrument of their own, and two provisions in the whole sample reach the party that built the model.
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.
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.
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.
Kenya's draft AI policy promises a pay benchmark for data work indexed to rates abroad
A row in the implementation matrix commits to a fair-pay reference framework for data annotation and content moderation, calibrated to international rates. The document gives no rate and does not say whose. What is scheduled first is a publication, and publishing it needs nobody else's signature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The World Development Report 2026 is out
The World Bank's flagship on artificial intelligence has published. One of its numbers, what the nine chapters cover, and what I will be writing about here.
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.
Control beats location
Time governments realize that control beats location.
I wish government software were updated half as often as this is
I just wish government software was half as updated as Claude Code is. A version number like 1.21459.3 means a permanent team shipping improvements every day.
What closing a digital governance programme in Serbia actually showed
This week, World Bank leadership flew to Belgrade for the closure meeting of Serbia's Enabling Digital Governance (EDGE) project.
What is actually holding governments back on the agentic state
When it comes to The Agentic State, what is actually holding governments back? The launch of our vision paper last October triggered months of conversations with governments across every continent.
Hacking the public sector, and the civil servants who do it
'What I really love is hacking the public sector. And for that, I need my cracha.' The most effective public servants are not outsiders throwing rocks, they are insiders who know which doors their badge opens.
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.
A very specific kind of AI failure in government
I start to see a very specific kind of AI failure in government. A new tool arrives, the institution responds with what it already knows how to do: mandatory training, warnings, guardrails, committees, sign-offs.
In many countries competitive recruitment is more fiction than fact
In many countries, competitive recruitment is more fiction than fact. And in the public sector in particular, interviews are often the stage where merit quietly disappears and “soft-rigging” takes over.
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.
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.
We have far more AI policy trackers than AI deployment trackers
I wish we had at least half as many AI deployment trackers as we have AI policy trackers. Especially in contexts where deployments are likely to have major consequences….
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.
Looking for machine learning systems that are actually running in government
Help needed: looking for real-world Machine Learning systems in government A few weeks ago, I reached out to this network asking for compelling GenAI use cases in public-sector workflows.
The UK's Copilot experiment with 20,000 civil servants deserves more attention
The UK's Copilot experiment with 20,000 civil servants deserves way more attention than it's gotten. The results, 26 minutes saved per day, might seem modest, but they reveal something crucial about AI in government.
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.
Why generative AI isn't transforming government (yet)
I asked practitioners, NGOs and philanthropies a simple question: where are the compelling generative AI use cases in public-sector workflows? The responses, though numerous, were underwhelming.
New research: what digital participation actually changes
New in Government Information Quarterly, with Fredrik Sjoberg: who takes part in digital participation does not by itself determine who benefits. What decides it is whether, and how, governments respond.
Who participates in digital democracy, and who really benefits?
The dominant assumption is that who participates determines who benefits. Across participatory budgeting in Brazil, FixMyStreet, Iceland's crowdsourced constitution and Change.org, that chain broke at some stage in every case.
The overlooked upside of AI for developing nations
While most discussions about AI and developing nations fixate on risks and challenges, we often overlook the glaringly obvious opportunities.
Forty-five percent of UK public services report no AI use at all
Excellent new survey by Jonathan Bright and colleagues at the Alan Turing Institute shows that 45% of UK public service professionals are aware of GenAI use at work, while 22% use it themselves.