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