Singapore gears up to scale public sector's use of AI agents in later 2026
GovTech Singapore is currently developing a registry to track AI agent usage among public officers, as part of the AI Assistant Desk suite made available to all public officers.
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GovTech Singapore is currently developing a registry of AI agents to track who owns each agent and what it does. Image: Canva
As Singapore prepares to put artificial intelligence (AI) agents in the hands of around 150,000 public officers, the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore) has been building an accountability infrastructure to match.
According to a report in The Straits Times, GovTech is currently developing a registry of AI agents to track who owns each agent and what it does.
The registry sits within GovTech's AI Assistant Desk suite, giving the government visibility over how public officers use AI agents in their daily work, from drafting reports, managing schedules to writing codes.
GovTech is piloting the suite with some public officers ahead of a broader rollout later in 2026, with the agency's Chief Executive Goh Wei Boon telling The Straits Times it aims to give every public officer “a secure personal digital assistant.”
“We want to have a layer of customisable rules, sanctioned AI tools and a registry to provide better visibility and security, so we can ensure that people use AI agents correctly,” he said.
Unlike conventional AI, AI agents can proactively work out the steps needed to complete a task with minimal or no human input.
The ability to use natural language to prompt and reason also makes AI agents easy for public officers to use, with no technical expertise required.
Even as government agencies mix the use of in-house and third-party AI tools, Goh said that the suite’s security layer holds firm regardless of which tools were used or replaced.
These guardrails include blocking agents from deleting files or emailing external recipients, and capping the number of recipients to prevent spam, he added.
The agency will also run automated checks to catch offensive language before it enters or leaves the AI systems.
Earlier at GovTech’s STACKx Cybersecurity event in April, Goh stressed the importance of baking security into centralised platforms used by public officers from the start, rather than treating it as an afterthought.
You can read other articles covering GovTech Singapore here in our digital government directory.