Redbox

Reinventing the Ministerial Red Box

The Ministerial red box has been the primary destination for state papers since they came into government in the mid-19th century. Redbox was initially envisioned as a way to leverage AI to search through thousands of documents, chat with them and summarise them into tailored briefings. After a hackathon in July 2023, we spun up a small prototyping team with members from the No10 Innovation Fellowship and Evidence House. Within two months the prototype was being trialled within three different Private Offices in the Cabinet Office. The trial gave us many future avenues of development and also helped test our rigorous AI safety mechanisms.

Just like ministers, civil servants deal with a wealth of information on a day to day basis. We’re now in the process of building the next generation of Redbox which will become a powerful tool for all departments; built by government, for government.

Piloting Redbox

Through piloting Redbox with users across Cabinet Office we have found that there is value in providing civil servants with access to Large Language Models (LLMs) to use for OFFICIAL SENSITIVE (OFF-SEN) business. While we tested several experimental features (such as ways of chatting with very large document sets that exceed model context windows, and agentic approaches to information retrieval) these features were making it harder to scale, and most users were sticking with the simpler features. For example, 77% of chats were not using any attached documents.

We decided to streamline Redbox, making an improved user experience and an app that can scale to many more users. Our vision is for Redbox to be the easiest and cheapest way for civil servants to chat with LLMs (up to an OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE level).

Civil servants can chat with or without their documents using the world’s most advanced LLMs and choose the LLM they would like to use.

Redbox capitalises on its proactive data privacy and retention features for the purpose of maintaining compliance and managing data. Redbox is securely designed, allowing civil servants to interact with documents up to OFFICIAL SENSITIVE classification.

We are committed to transparency through open sourcing, you can find our code on Github at https://github.com/i-dot-ai/redbox.