OpenAI’s country-by-country release of 6 August 2026 names its audience: the statistics “will help people, including policymakers and researchers around the world”. The methodology note then says which people. It covers Free, Go, Plus and Pro accounts, “the group of accounts generally managed by individuals rather than organizations.” Managed accounts, the kind a ministry would hold, are out of scope by construction.
The second dataset, B2B Signals, does cover organisations. Its launch report cuts them by function (IT, security, finance) and by named firms. Government is not one of the cuts.
OpenAI’s own government page claims “over 1 million public sector professionals rely on OpenAI products”.
Leaving out managed accounts is a defensible scope choice for a consumer dataset, and it still writes out a fifth of the workforce. General government employment averaged 18.4% of total employment across the OECD in 2023, and 30.1% in Norway. I have argued that the public sector’s difficulty with AI is institutional rather than technological. The Alan Turing Institute put the share of public-sector time generative AI could support at roughly 41%, and the UK’s trial with 20,000 civil servants saved 26 minutes a day. Neither reading can be tested while the public sector is not counted separately.
The opportunity for the labs is a public sector cut printed next to the country tables. Norway’s government employs 30.1% of its workforce, and no lab reports what any of them do with these tools.
Assorted links
- Among Dwarkesh Patel’s eight predictions for continual learning: labs may keep their best models from any enterprise that refuses to let them train on its sessions, a condition a public body holding citizen records cannot meet.
- Atkinson and O’Bryan detect AI-assisted writing in published government documents, four of ten streams showing it by 2026 against a near-zero 2021 baseline, which is how public-sector AI use gets measured when no lab publishes it.
- Moonshot AI’s freely deployable Kimi K3 would let a government run a frontier model on its own hardware, invisible to any lab’s usage report, though Rest of World found no government has yet adopted one.