The AI in the article you linked was Open Claw, which is an open-source version of one of these persistent AIs, so you’re right. It links to LLMs like Claude, but Anthropic haven’t actually released their own version yet, which is why it was showing up in the original files as ‘built but not yet shipped’.
Currently the AI only runs for a short time after you provide a prompt. So say you ask it to ‘draft a letter to my congressman demanding an end to the war’, the AI will read what you wrote and output its interpretation of what you want, then it will stop.
What they’re talking about here is something very different, something which can continue processing inputs all of the time. It would be ‘aware’ of (depending on what you give it access to) emails coming in, what you’re working on in other programs, calendar events, etc. The idea is that it could potentially interrupt you with suggestions, maybe even anticipate what you will want and do it for you.
Obviously this is going to be risky at first. We’ve already seen stories of AIs deleting entire projects, what could they get up to if they’re allowed to be your online stand-in with access to everything on your device?
If the UK Government is so eager for sovereign AI capability, why are they relying on a US company to design, build, and presumably run it?