Agency-provided agents (a public option)

A free, government-provided agent at every service entry point, aligned to the user and auditable by the public. A user without a bank, employer, or subscription that supplies an agent still gets one at the door of the service.

The impact of agents

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 serve the bank's interests ahead of the user's. Users without commercial relationships (the very people most likely to need government services) are excluded entirely.

What must be verified

Government needs every user to be able to reach agentic services through an agent that answers to the user, 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 user and the agency can both trust whose interests it serves. The providing agency must publish and keep current that audit of the agent's alignment, training data, and decision logic.

Protecting access

Users with no bank, employer, insurer, or subscription relationship have no route to a capable agent when agents come bundled with those relationships.

Keeping the path open

Offer a free public agent at every service entry point, so reaching agentic government is never conditioned on wealth or an existing institutional relationship.
Hold that public agent to the same accessibility criteria as any novel surface: operable by assistive technology, plain-language by default, and usable on low-end and shared devices.

Response surface

Service Entry

Every service entry point offers a free government agent, presented alongside whatever agent the user already has.

City Housing Office

Apply for a housing transfer

An assistant can prepare this application with you. Use the free public one, keep the one you already have, or do it without an assistant. The outcome is assessed the same way.

You can switch assistants at any point without starting over.

The public agent sits in the same list as the commercial ones, at the same weight, rather than behind a link to an alternatives page. Using a government service never requires a commercial account.

Maturity

Emerging

For government-provided public options, where the Swiss Apertus model runs in production and IRS Direct File ran two filing seasons before the IRS discontinued it.
Frontier Headline

For a public-option agent at government service entry points, where Ukraine's Diia.AI open beta is the only live deployment and no full production deployment exists elsewhere.

Precedents

IRS Direct File. The Internal Revenue Service built a government-provided free tax filing tool as an alternative to the commercial software offered through the Free File Alliance. Its after-action report on the pilot found 90 percent of users rating their experience excellent or above average and a Net Promoter Score of +74, with season-end figures the following year at 94 percent and +80. The IRS then told its 25 partner states the tool would not be available for the next filing season, and set no future launch date.

Schneier on public AI. Schneier argues for federally funded foundation models as a public service, analogous to public roads or the postal system, providing a competitive baseline private offerings must meet. Switzerland has built Apertus, a large language model made by Swiss public servants and university researchers on appropriately licensed training data and public supercomputing infrastructure. One jurisdiction has taken the proposal as far as a shipped model.

Ukraine's Diia.AI. The Ministry of Digital Transformation runs a state AI agent on the Diia portal that consults, navigates services, and delivers income certificates directly in chat, with state-registry data shielded from the cloud model behind an on-premise perimeter. It is a public-option deployment answering to the state rather than to a commercial intermediary. Usage figures circulate only through secondary reporting.

What carries over to agent use

High. The IRS Direct File precedent demonstrates that government-provided tools can outperform commercial alternatives on user satisfaction, and that a public option can nonetheless be withdrawn on cost and uptake grounds while that satisfaction is rising.

For an agent-mediated government services context, this translates to a pattern where the government provides a baseline agent whose alignment is to the user 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.

Where things go wrong

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 that steers them toward its own products. An agency can also game its own public-option commitment: offering it a step further away in the flow than the commercial agent, or letting its funding and capability lag until it exists on paper without matching what users are offered. A publicly auditable baseline agent aligned to the user reduces that chance.

Sources

9 references US · UA

Primary frameworks

The instrument, the operating deployment, or the official record itself.

Reporting & analysis

Writing about the subject rather than the framework itself, including vendor commentary.