Singapore to Create AI Agent Registry for 150,000 Public Officers
Source: The Straits Times
Singapore is building a registry of AI agents to track and manage the use of autonomous AI tools across 150,000 public officers as part of its AI Assistant Desk initiative. GovTech CEO Goh Wei Boon confirmed the system will provide visibility and security over AI agents that make decisions at machine speed.
Singapore is taking a structured approach to AI governance in the public sector. The government is developing a registry of AI agents for its 150,000 public officers, part of a broader initiative called the AI Assistant Desk — a secure personal digital assistant for every government employee. GovTech CEO Goh Wei Boon confirmed the system is already being tested with a smaller group of officers, with wider rollout slated for later this year.
The registry addresses a fundamental question: as AI agents become capable of autonomous decision-making, who owns what they do? The platform will track agent ownership and activities, enforce granular security rules — disallowing agents from deleting files or sending external emails — and run automated hygiene checks on prompts and outputs. These guardrails remain intact even when third-party AI tools are swapped in or out.
Beyond the registry, GovTech is pushing AI into cybersecurity. The agency has been running automated penetration testing on approximately 2,000 government systems containing citizen data since January 2026, replacing the old model of annual manual audits with continuous, AI-driven security scanning. This shift was accelerated by the 2025 cyberespionage attack by group UNC3886 on Singapore’s telcos, which underscored the limits of periodic human-led testing.
The existing Pair chatbot is already used by over 50 per cent of public officers for writing, research and productivity. New prototypes include Markly, an AI marking assistant trialled in 18 schools, and LangBuddy, a voice-based chatbot for mother tongue languages being tested by 300 students across 10 secondary schools. These tools emerged from GovTech’s inaugural hackathon in 2025.
Why it matters for Singapore: The AI agent registry signals a deliberate shift from treating AI as an experimental curiosity to managing it as operational infrastructure. Singapore’s goal of having 100,000 AI-fluent individuals by 2029 depends on exactly this kind of structured rollout — building guardrails first, then scaling access. It also positions GovTech, which has grown from 1,800 to 3,900 employees since 2016, as one of the more forward-thinking government IT agencies globally on AI governance.