AI and automation inside government: services, benefits, procurement and accountability.
The promotional deals that put ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini on millions of federal desks for a dollar are expiring or turning into pay-per-use contracts. Agencies must now budget for AI as a running cost.
The IndiaAI Mission has bought its way to tens of thousands of subsidised GPUs and twenty home-grown models. Rising chip and memory prices now make utilisation, pricing and energy, not headline capacity, the numbers that matter.
Within days of launch, Washington's AI front door was reported to have changed what it said about elections and presidential terms. The real question is not who is right, but who decides, and how anyone would know.
Government is not a single building but a moving system of tiers, departments and languages. One issue has many owners and many voices, and a state that reads only its dominant language sees only part of itself.
Albania presented its AI "minister" as a cure for corrupt procurement. Reports that the agency behind it is under investigation should prompt every government to ask what makes a public algorithm trustworthy in the first place.
Records from Medicare's AI prior-authorisation pilot show thousands of denials, an 83-day wait against a 72-hour standard and vendors paid more when they say no. The flaw is not only the software; it is the contract.
The UAE wants half its government services run by AI agents within two years; Canada is backing tens of billions in "sovereign" compute. Both are bets on control. The chips underneath tell a more complicated story.
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