TL;DR
GOV.UK Chat, the government’s AI assistant in the GOV.UK App, has handled queries from over 36,000 people since it went live in April 2026, Stephanie Peacock, the minister for digital government, has told Parliament. PublicTechnology reported on 9 November that this averages over 7,000 users a month, or roughly one in 15 app users. The Government Digital Service (GDS) plans to scale it up in 2027 and add agentic capabilities.
The numbers
Peacock gave the figures in a written parliamentary answer to the Conservative MP Ben Spencer. The chatbot was fully built into the GOV.UK App from 14 May, after a soft launch that began in March; at that point the app had 563,000 users. PublicTechnology puts uptake at 6.4% of users some five months after full rollout. The tool runs on Anthropic’s Claude.
“GOV.UK Chat is in early beta stage and available in the GOV.UK App,” Peacock said. Its development costs sit inside GDS’s wider budget rather than being reported separately. GDS, she said, plans to extend it with “agentic capabilities that make it easier for citizens to get what they need from government”.
The rest of the toolkit
Spencer also asked about the suite of civil service AI tools once branded Humphrey. Peacock said four tools from i.AI, the government’s AI incubator, are in production use: Parlex, Minute, Extract and Consult. Between them they have drawn over 1,000 log-ins weekly since September, and their costs are not separated by product either. Redbox, a summarising and briefing tool in the original Humphrey line-up, was not on her list. i.AI has published evaluations of two of them, Extract and Consult.
What it means
These are the first usage numbers for GOV.UK Chat since its wider launch, which drew accessibility concerns in May. In our view, 6.4% uptake is modest but reasonable for a feature still labelled beta. The more telling gap is in the reporting: neither the chatbot’s costs nor the i.AI tools’ costs are broken out, which makes value for money hard to judge from outside.
The agentic plans matter more than the current figures. Moving GOV.UK Chat from answering questions to acting for citizens would raise new questions about accuracy, accountability and which model sits underneath, especially as the government told Computer Weekly on 9 November that its AI tools are designed so the underlying model can be swapped.