I'm no expert, but my reckon is that it's the delta btwn on-device capability and cloud, hence them having to do a slightly desperate deal with Google for access to Gemini. Plus they didn't think through agentic security, which was a really weird error (see Siri demo snafu from last year)
Totally. It's also potentially incredibly useful. And 15 years ago we'd have run around screaming about the privacy implications of today's Cloud + Smartphone + Sensors. The moats only gonna get deeper I fear.
Yeah which is why using bank statements as proof of address is such a nightmare. Until last year I was hoping Apple might ride to the rescue wrt on device inference...
Agreed - though if you're mad you can give OpenClaw access to email, calendar and I'll wager Opus would do a surprisingly good job of joining the dots of irregular payments. (I'm not mad)
Agree completely - hence the need for two "agents" where the one that accesses your financial info is acting entirely in your interests - and as @robbowley.net pointed out, this agent probably doesn't need much if any AI since open banking data is already well structured.
I agree almost completely. Normalisation of transactional identifiers across different banks is still... messy, but will doubtless improve. And there are some kinds of income/outgoings that could benefit from some natural language magic (irregular child maintenance payments etc)
I blogged about using AI Agents to infer benefit entitlement directly from bank statements. Which is kinda wild... (also, Open Banking is a huge national asset).
loosemore.com/2026/03/05/4...
Cabinet Ministers have a formal legal status. But not their departments.
They're agents of the Crown. Hence why they can be created, discarded or merged at will. And why you can negotiate (or renegotiate) on their behalf without their consent. Most of the £4bn of tech savings btwn 2011-2015 came courtesy of the latter.
Has anyone got OpenClaw working well with a local LLM? This article is giving me the fear, but I'm sure most of my stuff doesn't need cloud LLM oomph rentamac.io/best-local-l...
What are you run on?
That's a fair challenge. I wonder how OpenClaw would get on running one of the open LLM models (not quite well enough I'll wager - at least not quite *yet*).
I fear the French are overtaking us... goodtech.info/datagouv-ser...
As others with much more experience than me have pointed out, it's surprisingly rare that a lack of understanding of someone's legal entitlement to be the primary barrier. people getting benefits. It's... complex.
I did check that, and until she's got attendance allowance his mother can't be included.
Over the weekend I played with using OpenClaw (Opus 4.5) and my new MissingBenefit.com MCP server to conduct mock benefit entitlement sessions.
The results were... well, have a look at the video my blog post.
loosemore.com/2026/03/02/o...
My friend Russell on persuading the powers that be that ministers, apparently for the first time ever, watch a ppt-style presentation in the actual Cabinet Room - leading to some excellent advice about visiting a venue before you present.
I've been buying them in bulk second hand, cus I is cheap... (and people sell off job lots)
it's very very addictive...
Independent Financial Advisor
You don’t hear much about efficient and effective govt so here’s a good news story in our latest @nao.org.uk report - HMRC collected an extra £16bn from the biggest businesses last year after it took a “more hands-on approach”
www.ft.com/content/c96d... (Full report: www.nao.org.uk/reports/taxi...)
Thank you...
What's the best OpenBanking API provider for normal UK customers? Just need statement read access, nothing complicated, but ideally statement entries normalised across banks @dgen.net
Most IFAs are toast.
AI agents (not AI bots) are getting very good at pretending to be real people. Like, they can remotely control a Google Chrome page just as if they were you - and you can watch them doing it, which is *spooky*.
I've done some more blogging, this time about MCP.
"In the future, all our AI Agent Overlords will speak MCP." loosemore.com/2026/02/27/i...
I cannot claim that as my own. I have picked that up from teams in Digital Prevention Services at NHS E who I would say are some of the humans doing digital things in some of the best ways right now.
This is disappointing and I don’t understand why. It was useful when @therealnooshu.bsky.social did (started?) it, to be able to see a very broad UK-wide level of browser usage. Are they going to ask @therealnooshu.bsky.social to delete his old tweets?
"Successful Digital Public Infrastructure should aim to be so good it’s negligent not to use it."
Taken from a wonderful talk by @richardpope.org on how to apply the principles in his book Platformland to deliver the NHS 10-year plan.
www.rpp.works/ways-of-doin...
