Article by Alberto Rodriguez Alvarez: “The next wave of AI will be defined by agentic systems that can take actions: query databases, navigate portals, retrieve records, and increasingly interact with public digital infrastructure at scale.
That shift is already showing up as traffic hitting government sites and services is becoming machine traffic. Some of it is benign (search and discovery). Some of it is ambiguous (scraping and automated browsing). And some of it could become actively harmful if AI agents can reserve scarce services, submit fraudulent requests, or generate volume that overwhelms public systems.
The problem is that the government’s current interfaces were not designed for agent-to-government interactions, and the default state of the world has become improvisation: agents “figure it out” by scraping pages and guessing based on previous learning.
This is where Boston’s work becomes instructive. Rather than treating agents as something to block wholesale, or something to embrace without guardrails, Boston is experimenting with a middle path: build a governed, secure, and reliable layer that mediates how AI agent systems interact with government resources…(More)”.
