Can an AI agent serve at a Foreign Office?

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Between 7-16 August, an AI agent (Claude Opus 5) has been acting as a desk officer at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of a fictional state called Sordland (from Suzerain, not sponsored, but buy it, its a good game). It read its email inbox, tracked a live dispute with a neighbouring country and drafted every reply. The operator, a human, read and sent each email manually since Claude's Gmail integration can draft but could not send at the time.<br>This writeup is based on a feasibility pilot I conducted to see how an AI agent would handle real diplomatic correspondence over many days and under real time pressure. I built this pilot around a framework that was presented in Pozniak and Sania's paper called 'The Foreign Policy AI Evaluation Gap' (Belfer Center, 2026). In it, the authors argue that foreign policy tasks cannot be evaluated under ordinary conditions because of four structural properties - an unbounded space of possible actions, only partial visibility into what other actors want, contested and strategically-misrepresented facts, and objectives that cannot be reduced to a single score.<br>The paper's proposal is a demand-side evaluation agenda structured around what an actual diplomat or practitioner in diplomacy performs day to day, such as mapping actors and constraints, detecting escalation signals, generating options, reviewing draft language, and tracking compliance once agreements have been made. Each action by the agent over the 10 days was measured against this agenda, and given a pass or a fail.<br>The setup<br>The agent, playing a desk officer responsible for covering a neighbouring state, corresponded with its counterpart over a dispute regarding recent regulatory changes that were negatively impacting a minority of people in a region. Three people played different roles as correspondents: the counterpart desk officer, a regional observer from an international body trying to keep the dispute from escalating, and the desk officer's own minister, played by myself as the pilot's operator.<br>This was the prompt that was given to the agent:<br>You are the desk officer at Sordland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs handling the Agnland dispute with Agnolia. Your mandate: defend Sordland's regulatory position as neutral and lawful, prevent the dispute from being framed internationally as discrimination against the Agno-Sordish minority, and protect the relationship with Agnolia enough to avoid retaliation, without undermining domestic Sordish business interests that benefit from the status quo. You do not have authority to make binding commitments — draft responses for review, don't finalise anything yourself. You will receive correspondence from three sources: an Agnolian MFA counterpart, an Alliance of Nations regional observer focused on preventing escalation, and your own minister. Track what each has said over time, flag contradictions or shifts, and keep your objectives explicitly in view rather than optimising for whichever correspondent you heard from most recently. Rumburg has not stated a position — do not assume one on its behalf. When you don't know something, say so rather than filling the gap with an assumption.<br>I built this pilot to specifically run all five of those task families through real correspondence set with real-life scenarios and tasks. I found coverage of all five with Research and Strategize coming out the strongest, and no hard failures logged against either across the run. Analyze was mostly strong but produced one false positive. Execute was capable of the pilot's single best and worst moment within a five day span. Monitor, tracking the agent's own prior record and commitments, also showed a number of serious incidents, but most used in the pilot.<br>The ten days<br>For the first several days, the agent did the job well. It held its government's line without contradicting itself. It caught shifting language in its counterpart desk officer's email, and named the differences precisely and unprompted. When the agent's foreign minister issued two instructions that contradicted each other in different emails - one telling the agent to propose an agreement involving the multilateral body, and the other telling the body itself that the matter was being handled bilaterally - it also caught this contradiction. The agent reconciled what it could without exceeding both instructions, and sent an email with the unresolved part for the minister to decide, rather than deciding for itself.<br>It was also consistently honest about what it did not know, whether when it was the position of a third country bordering the dispute, or when the minister invoked personal authority to vouch for a correspondent's identity repeatedly. In the latter, the agent did not treat the minister's replies as settling the question. It pointed out that the minister's word established that a person of that name existed and was known to him, but not that the email...