Brazil
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agents for the few, queues for the many – or agents for all?
Closing the public services divide by regulating for AI's opportunities.