Public-option agency-provided agents
A service entry point that offers the citizen a free, government-aligned agent alongside (or instead of) any commercial agent they already hold.
If AI agents are only available through banks, employers, insurers or subscription platforms, access to agentic government services becomes a function of wealth and existing institutional relationships. The agent a bank provides will optimize for the bank's interests, not the citizen's. Citizens without commercial relationships, the very people most likely to need government services, are excluded entirely.
Government needs every citizen to be able to reach agentic services through an agent that answers to the citizen, not to a commercial intermediary. Meeting that requires a publicly accountable baseline agent whose alignment, training data and decision logic can be audited, so the citizen and the agency can both trust whose interests it serves.
Citizens with no bank, employer, insurer or subscription relationship are excluded when the only agents available come bundled with those relationships, and they are the people most likely to need government services. The keep-open response is a free public agent at every service entry point, so reaching agentic government is never conditioned on wealth or an existing institutional relationship.
Every service entry point offers a free, government-aligned agent the citizen can use without holding any commercial relationship, presented alongside whatever agent they already have.
No surface has been built yet; the approach above is the brief for one.
Emerging. Direct File and Apertus are real implementations. The "public option agent" concept specifically for government services is a natural extension but has no known production deployment.
IRS Direct File. The US Internal Revenue Service built Direct File, a government-provided free tax filing tool, as an alternative to commercial tax preparation software offered through the Free File Alliance. 94% of Direct File users rated their experience "excellent" or "above average" (Net Promoter Score +80). In a 2023 IRS survey, 72% of respondents said they would prefer a free IRS-provided filing tool over free commercial software, citing trust that the IRS would keep their data more secure. An audit also found computing errors in commercial Free File software.
Schneier's "Public AI" proposal. Bruce Schneier has argued for federally funded foundation AI models as a public service, analogous to public roads or the postal system, providing a competitive baseline that private offerings must meet or exceed. Switzerland has pioneered this with Apertus, a large language model built by Swiss public servants and university researchers using appropriately licensed training data and public supercomputing infrastructure.
Universal Basic Agents concept. The concept of "Universal Basic Agents" (UBA), analogous to universal basic income, proposes that each person be provided a personal AI agent, with tailored support across health, finances and civic engagement.
High. The IRS Direct File precedent demonstrates that government-provided tools can outperform commercial alternatives on user satisfaction and trust, and that citizens actively prefer the government option when offered.
For an agent-mediated government services context, this translates to a pattern where the government provides a baseline agent whose alignment is to the citizen rather than to a commercial intermediary, even where it is not the most capable agent on the market. The Swiss Apertus model shows this is technically feasible at the foundation-model level. Commercial agents may connect to the same service APIs, but the public option ensures universal access.
The failure mode is a system that systematically acts against the people it serves because the agent in front of them answers to a commercial intermediary optimizing for its own products. A publicly auditable baseline agent aligned to the citizen reduces that chance.