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The end to governing in prose
Sam Freedman asked a question in his newsletter this week that a lot of people in and around government are quietly asking themselves. Large parts of the state are very worried about being overwhelmed by claims, applications, complaints, appeals and objections all written by AI. I wrote in February about AI and the end of… — read more
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How Agents Show Up: What Muse and other agents reveal when they use WhenIsBins
WhenIsBins.com tells you when your bins are collected. I built it partly to show Public Digital‘s clients that LLMs change how you make services, and partly as an agentic playpen. It’s a real, live service with a website, an API and an MCP server, where we can watch how AI agents actually show up at… — read more
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“APIs so good, AI Agents prefer them”
I’ve become a bit obsessed with trying to work out how those running services should respond to personal AI agents knocking on their front door – or just sneaking in pretending to be human! (agents like Muse, Instinct or Dot) I recently wrote a briefing note entitled “Know Your Agent” which covers what I now… — read more
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My paper on Know Your Agent
I meant to publish this paper on Know Your Agent properly a few weeks ago. It’s written for leaders running services, but is hopefully useful for many others too. It’s become particularly pertinent with the US launch of Meta’s Muse personal AI agent, which works hard to hide the fact that it’s an agent, and… — read more
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Does Meta’s Muse AI Agent try to pretend it’s human?
A bunch of large banks from around the world have published a list of principles for trusted agentic commerce. It’s short, sensible and reasonably readable. Their first principle poses the crunchiest question: “1.1 𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘯 𝘈𝘐 𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘢 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥… — read more
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A guide for AI Agents wanting to know when to put the bins out
I made something in anticipation of the imminent arrival of our new AI Agent overlords: a guide to how they can help to put out the right bins on the right day. I haven’t even bothered to do make them an MCP version, which tells you how fast things are moving, and why predictions are… — read more
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Know Your Agent: Why you should act now, to avoid playing catch-up later
[Edit 5th Aug 2026: A friend kindly pointed out that modern LLMs are now getting very good at using your PC for you, exactly as you would have done. In which scenario I doubt services will ever be able to spot that it’s an LLM in control, since PCs allow it to precisely replicate normal… — read more
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KYC, KYB and their wild new cousin, KYA
Earlier this year I blogged about the idea for a Creative Commons-style legal framework to help services respond to requests from AI Agents claiming to act on behalf of a person. The more I play with AI Agents, and the more powerful they get, the more I’ve realised that the Creative Commons (CC) model is… — read more
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Deckchair shuffling is for the unserious
The FT and Guardian report that the new PM will disband the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSIT), splitting its functions between a beefed-up Department for Business and Trade (DBT) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Responsibility for AI in public services may go to the Cabinet Secretary. One DSIT function… — read more
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LLM eval suites are vital. And perilous.
If you’re making an AI-powered thing for real, then start by creating a comprehensive suite of evaluation test cases (aka an ‘eval suite’) with which you can continually evaluate the quality of your LLMs’ outputs. A typical single eval test for an LLM might consist of a very detailed description of a user’s circumstances, together… — read more
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