Welcome to Your Nightmare: The Externalization of the Agentic State

The Agentic State is an instrument for an even tighter control of all activities on earth, and a dream come true for every aspiring dictator who wants to play god

Global Government Technology Centre i Berlin

In October last year World Economic Forum opened the Global Government Technology Centre (GGTC) at GovTech Campus Deutschland in Berlin with the mission to “accelerate the digital transformation of government” together with “founding partner”, French IT-consultant Capgemini. The latter is an aspiring “global leader in Agentic AI-powered Intelligent Operations”.

The initiative is a part of WEFs network Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the ongoing technocratic world revolution, and fulfills G20’s goal of developing a Digital Public Infrastructure to accelerate the Sustainable Development Goals (an initiative launched during India’s presidency in 2023).

Why they chose Berlin—a city with such a troublesome history regarding governmental totalitarian control—one can only speculate about. But it is fitting.

The goal is to “make the GGTC the global platform for driving GovTech forward.”

GovTech is developed to improve the “efficiency, transparency, and responsiveness of government operations and public services”, which also happens to be an integral part of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

GovTech Campus Deutschland is a collaboration between the German Government, German state agencies, the science community, and is also supported by the Eclipse Foundation.

Founded as the Eclipse Project by IBM in November 2001, with support from a consortium of software vendors, it builds on a dark legacy regarding the company's role in providing “GovTech” (punched cards) to Nazi Germany (as described in Edwin Black's book IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation). Strategic member companies include IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Huawei, Fujitsu, Bosch, and Red Hat.

The GovTech they will now provide is something the Nazis could only dream of. The technological development has since changed the game and created the conditions for a control state with chilling consequences for the freedom of mankind.

GGTC have since its founding started a sister center in Kiev, while the technocratic role model country, the United Arab Eremites, has been affiliated as a “founding partner”.

Both Ukraine and UAE can be viewed as WEF vassals and are testing beds for GovTech solutions, with GGTC as a contributor to the Ukrainian Digital State UA (a Global Platform for Digital Solutions and GovTech Innovation).

The Agentic State

The Global Government Technology Centre recently released a white paper called The Agentic State which outlines a vision for an AI-governed future.¹

Main author is Luukas Ilves, a Stanford University graduate who is the Chief Information Officer of the Government of Estonia, and the founder of the Tech Green Pledge, “a network of tech companies committed to combatting climate change”.

The choice of title is quite revealing.² The term “agentic state” has a dual meaning.

1. A state of mind in which one becomes a willing or unwitting agent for an authority. The Agentic State theory, coined by psychologist Stanley Milgram after his famous conformity tests, states that,

…the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and they therefore no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow.³

2. A state run by or with AI. The Agentic State is basically a recipe for large scale population control with little or no human agency. As stated in the paper,

   The Agentic State signifies a fundamental shift in governance, where AI systems can perceive, reason, and act with minimal human intervention to deliver public value. (The Agentic State, p. 20)

[An AI agent can broadly be defined as “an entity that senses percepts (sound, text, image, pressure etc.) using sensors and responds (using effectors) to its environment,” according to the International Organization for Standardization.]

The Agentic State is like a technocratic manual that describes ten “functional layers” of government (pp. 9–36) ordered in three dimensions:

Operations

1. Service Delivery:
   “From fragmented portals to self-composing public services and
   personal concierges.”

2. Internal Workflows:
   “From manual casework to outcome-driven agents with humans on the loop.”

3. Data Governance, Management, and Operations:
   “An operational asset for agents and a strategic asset for society as a whole.”

4. Crisis Response and Resilience:
   “From legacy responses to agentic readiness in an era of polycrisis.”

Regulation and Governance

5. Compliance and Reporting:
   “Continuous compliance that preserves confidentiality and supports lighter regulation.”

6. Policy and Rulemaking:
   “From static rulebooks to living policies, continuously monitored and adapted by AI agents.”

Foundations

7. Leadership:
   “The skills and behaviours of outcome-driven government leaders
   who will build agentic states.”

8. Workforce and Culture:
   Towards broad tech fluency, elite talent, and high-performance culture.”

9. Tech Stack:
   “Leapfrogging to tomorrow’s enterprise stack.”

10. Public Procurement:
    “How Agentic AI redefines how governments buy and what they get.”

Polycrisis management

Of these, the chapters on “Crisis Response” and “Compliance” are of utmost importance in understanding the diabolical nature of this new governance regime.

The white paper concludes that our world isn’t prepared or equipped for “a world of cascading geopolitical, technological, environmental, and social shocks.” A phenomenon that is labeled as a polycrisis.

This polycrisis scenario is essentially what actors like climate tzar and frequent WEF-attendee Johan Rockström constantly has warned about.⁴ As described in the paper:

We are in an era increasingly characterised by polycrisis: interconnected and cascading shocks ranging from pandemics and extreme weather events to cyber-physical attacks, financial instability, disinformation campaigns and even conventional warfare — traditional crisis management models are under strain. Threat actors are already adapting. With AI, they can automate, scale, and personalise attacks at unprecedented speed. Governments, by contrast, are often still operating with institutional reflexes shaped for a slower, more linear world. (The Agentic State, p. 20)

But this can be countered with the deployment of “intelligent systems”.

Agentic government means equipping the state with intelligent systems that can anticipate, respond, and adapt across the entire crisis lifecycle: from prevention and preparedness to response, recovery, and continuous learning. (p. 20)

A part of this is “simulation infrastructure” with the claimed ability to predict the future. Everything we do will be analysed and simulated with the help of “virtual twins”.

Agentic models can continuously simulate crisis scenarios across domains, producing synthetic datasets that reveal systemic fragilities. More than stress tests, these simulations become generative foresight mechanisms. (p. 20)

If a problem is detected, this could trigger a “hyper-aware AI-orchestrated first response”. As described in the report,

When a crisis begins to unfold, AI initiates the first steps in crisis response before human-in-the-loop structures have time to react. These agents will work alongside increasingly autonomous physical systems such as drones and robots, forming the backbone of a responsive, adaptive crisis infrastructure. (p. 20)

This is starting to border on a science fiction dystopia. Just like Skynet in The Terminator, the machines will take the first step in order to solve the crisis, while predetermined protocols will ensure cohesive and coordinated crisis management.

This echoes the proposed United Nations Emergency Platform, which has been advocated by Johan Rockström and the Mary Robinson-led Climate Governance Commission.

Human agency will take a back seat. The authors states that,

Human oversight will increasingly move from making decisions to supervising them. This shift may feel uncomfortable, but those who let machines take the first step, especially in fast-moving situations, will gain an edge, with mental capacity freed up for critical thinking under pressure. (p. 21)

They are damn right that would feel uncomfortable!

Another part of the Agentic State with likely chilling consequences is “Compliance and Reporting”. This concerns the scan of live data and real-time compliance checks.

Compliance monitoring and reporting is one of the most obvious cases for agentic AI. Instead of depending on quarterly reports or scheduled inspections, a statement of conformity becomes a live reflection of the present. Compliance is no longer a retrospective snapshot; it is an active, up-to-date status. A well-governed AI compliance agent, running on a verifiable, tamper-resistant algorithm, could issue YES/NO compliance attestations without transmitting sensitive internal data. (p. 22)

What can possibly go wrong? “No more hiding” as WEF-trustee Al Gore said in his sales pitch video to the project Climate Trace (Tracking Real-time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions) which was launched in September 2021.

The Agentic State is an instrument for even tighter control of all activities on earth, and a dream come true for every aspiring dictator who wants to play god.

In this model, reporting becomes proof, not just paperwork. With more precise, real-time monitoring and verifiable reporting, regulators could cautiously recalibrate requirements toward socially optimal levels. In the long run, we can envision a situation where compliance in domains like health, safety, financial, environmental, cybersecurity, and ethics become a component of overall quality management, with less, not more, internal information crossing organisational boundaries. (p. 23)

In other words, “either you obey or you face the consequences”. But the authors actually ask some valid questions about needed safeguards.

If AI agents can issue fines or trigger legal action in real time, what safeguards are needed to prevent runaway enforcement or unjust penalties? What role should human oversight play in preserving legitimacy? (p. 23)

But this comes without the obvious conclusion of shutting down this totalitarian nightmare before it runs amok. A world with agentic AI in charge will lead to a dramatic change in how we are governed.

Laws, currently static code written once and amended rarely, can develop into a far more dynamic living system, continuously interpreted, tested, and refined by agents operating within clearly defined public mandates. (p. 24)

This means that an AI agent “will have the capability to rewrite laws as easily as agents rewrite code.”

AI agents can simulate complex systems, run policy scenarios, test and red team alternative designs at staggering volume and speed; where quantum computing will unlock a further leap. Moreover, AI can course-correct ‘at runtime’, detecting drift, bias, and systemic failures. (p. 25)

This new system will leave human legislators only to define “broad societal goals”, “while specific rules, thresholds and requirements are adjusted dynamically by agents with limited or no human intervention”! The question is who will be tasked of overseeing the goals for the Agentic State?

The authors rightly conclude that this new regime of “challenges contemporary notions of inclusion and participatory decision making” but don’t think it has to be “less democratic”.

So how do they think democracy and citizen participation should be accommodated?The solution has a bitter taste of cold logical technocratic efficiency, as it basically means that we humans will be connected to a cybernetic system that can detect and analyse human responses and adjust its decisions based on the feedback loops. As described in the paper,

Rather than operating solely through top-down regulatory adjustments, agentic policy systems could also learn from citizen signals. Feedback loops, such as appeals, time-to-resolution metrics, or even emotion detection in digital interactions, could become inputs for agent-guided policy refinement. In this model, the boundary between policy implementation and adjustment becomes porous: agents adjust rules not only based on macro-level KPIs but also from bottom-up input and friction indicators. (p. 25)

The White Paper essentially confirms the techniques that will be used to govern the global technocratic regime described in my books. Below is my take on of how this new world system will ultimately work, with GovTech as an integrated part and the United Nations as the definer of “broad societal goals”.

The World System with its three levels of government (from my books Temple of Solomon and The Digital World Brain). The central arrows show how goals are set top-down by the UN at the helm. The outer arrows form a figure 8 in an endless cybernetic loop between input (surveillance) and output (governance), with crises as the rationale behind it all and “crisis management” (via the planned but not yet approved Emergency Platform).

A briefing about the white paper was held July 1, 2025, where the authors presented and discussed how agentic AI will transform government operations.

My latest book Temple of Solomon can be ordered from Pharos Media (with some temporary limitations for delivery to the US until our Swedish postal services have updated its software to include the new tariffs ). My earlier books in English that are published by Skyhorse can be found at Amazon.

1. Global Government Technology Center (2025), The Agentic State, How Agentic AI Will Revamp 10 Functional Layers of Government and Public Administration, White Paper

2. Thanks to the reader who shared the video and drew my attention to the connection to Milgram’s theory.

3. Stanley Milgram (2020), Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

4. Thomas Homer-Dixon, Ortwin Renn, Johan Rockström, Jonathan F. Donges, and Scott Janzwood (2022), “A call for an international research program on the risk of a global polycrisis”; Climate Governance Commission (2023), Governing Our Planetary Emergency.