Representation & Equity
Where people reach government through AI agents, a private layer sits between what a user meant to say and what the agency receives. That layer changes the submission: it may arrive better ordered, or stripped of the details that made it recognizably that person’s. Either effect depends on the agent, which the service neither supplies nor can inspect.
The users with the least room to adjust are those with no agent, a weak one, or one built on a model that represents them poorly. They are often the users a service most needs to reach. An agency that keeps handling submissions as they arrive lets the quality of a user’s agent decide whose case it hears well.
Policy challenge
Government owes people roughly equal standing to reach an outcome it controls, whether to be heard in a consultation or to transact for a benefit, license, payment, or appeal. That equality has rested on users reaching the service directly.
More participation now runs through a privately supplied agent layer that government neither distributes nor controls. Whether a user's request lands depends on three things the service itself does not set: whether they have a capable agent at all, how well a model represents people like them, and whose interests the agent serves in advancing their position.
If an agency kept handling requests as they arrive, standing in its own services would track the quality of a user's tooling. The agency could not then meet its duty to treat the public on equal terms without acting on the agent layer directly.
Design challenge
Make sure every user can reach a government outcome, whether to be heard in a consultation or to transact for what they are entitled to, whether they bring a capable agent or none at all.
Keep what the user said intact regardless of the intermediary.
Make any agent route usable whatever a user's language, literacy, or assistive-technology needs.
Guarantee a route without an agent that reaches the same outcome, not just the same access.
Account for who a model serves badly, and keep those users capably represented.