Article by Tiago C. Peixoto: “…For over a decade, those focused on the demand side of open data paid, and rightly so, lots of attention on who would use the data, and how. AI solves the demand-side problem. But the moment you build the agent and point it at real government data, you discover a supply-side problem that was always there but never fully exposed. The techno-mediator bottleneck was masking it. When only a handful of skilled developers and data journalists could query government APIs, the partial nature of the data caused limited damage. The few who did the query had enough domain expertise to cross-reference. AI removes that containment. If millions of citizens can now query budget data through AI agents, and the data systematically undercounts by a factor of five, the result is not accountability at scale. It is misinformation at scale, laundered through the authority of clean data and confident AI responses.
To be clear: the open data movement never assumed the data was already “out there.” The whole point was to advocate for its release. The problem came after. When governments did start publishing, the shortage of people who could query and assess the data meant that its quality went, in many cases, largely unexamined. The mediation failure that reduced the usefulness of open data for accountability purposes also made it less useful for quality control. If almost nobody can check whether a budget API returns 20% or 100% of the real figures, governments face no cost for publishing incomplete extracts. The very conditions that weakened the demand side gave the supply side room to underdeliver, and to receive credit for it. Rather than a communication trick, openwashing was an architectural possibility created by the absence of capable users. And it was sustained by an institutional environment in which there was no requirement that a public-facing API reconcile with the government’s full internal financial records, no audit of coverage, and no penalty for publishing a clean but partial extract…(More)”.
