Tom Loosemore

For the past few weeks I’ve been playing with the dangerous agent magic of OpenClaw and Claude Cowork. Don’t worry, I’ve been using burner accounts on a burner Mac – I’m not insane.

Turns out that if you give a modern LLM the keys to both your machine and your online accounts, then they really can do a lot for you. Like, a lot, *lot* more than the ChatGPT/Gemini stuff we’re now kinda attuned to. Such power could be for good. Or for ill.

I’ve been exploring how public services might respond to the emergence of such ‘intelligent agents’. Such automated agents are not actually intelligent, but they are potentially very powerful tools; tools that can do a whole lot more for citizens than is currently possible with the web and apps etc.

Hence the Benefits Finder API that I knocked up on the train from Hereford on Monday. APIs like this are pure agent food. Government should make many more APIs available.

As Martha Lane Fox wrote in her 2011 report; public services will eventually have to ‘Go Wholesale’, with all the complexity that entails; Trust. Provenance. Inclusion. Safety. Hard problems. Big prize.

OpenClaw and Cowork let you do exciting new things precisely because they push the boundaries of security beyond the acceptable – hence my burner Mac et al. And I think it’ll be a while (a couple of years?) before that tension between security and utility is resolved enough for agents to enter the mainstream.

So there’s a brief window, during which time Governments must work out how their public services should respond, since the potential for such agents to both help *and harm* citizens is very significant.

The UK has a big advantage over some governments in that the content on GOV.UK is generally very clearly written, and so LLM-powered agents find it relatively easy to work out what they should be doing on behalf of their humans.

The new GOV.UK AI Studio is a good first step, and the people there are smart I recommend you follow closely what Kuba Bartwicki and his colleagues are up to via https://alphagov.github.io/govuk-ai/

One idea I pitched to Kuba was that all UK public services should now offer test accounts, to make the flow of each service journey much more transparent to humans, as well as agents. The time for ‘black box’ public services is over.

Getting all departments to agree to this is not in Kuba’s gift, but access to such test accounts would be hugely helpful to those experimenting with how agents can help citizens, albeit some thought would be needed around how to limit access to those intending to cause harm. Non-trivial, these balancing acts.

This new agent stuff how the power to do much good. And do much ill. Twas ever thus.