Artificial intelligence (AI) has quietly wormed its way into drafting American laws, and the people responsible for getting bills right say it’s creating a mess.
According to Politico, congressional staffers and outside advocacy groups are increasingly turning to chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT to write legislative text, forcing the House Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC) to clean up after them.
“AI is good for a lot of stuff,” Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, explained before warning, “But it’s not capable of drafting legislation that you would want to enact into law.”
One person who advises congressional offices said the OLC now spends “more time trying to fix AI-drafted legislation than it would take for them to draft it from scratch,” noting AI models reportedly stumble over fine legal distinctions, such as whether funding should be structured as “a tax credit, deduction, exclusion or grant.”
According to one congressional staffer tasked with doing a deep read of the proposed legislation, lawmakers have no idea what is coming down the road due to errors and citations that won’t hold up to scrutiny when conflicts arise.
“It’s absolutely terrifying, and no one is thinking about it yet,” they predicted.
The risks aren’t hypothetical, Politico is reporting. Case in point: In June, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s (R-FL) office published an amendment summary that still contained the unedited chatbot phrase “Claude responded.” Luna acknowledged on X that “my staff used AI to correct a draft text and didn’t edit,” which raised alarms at the time.
Ari Hershowitz, a lawyer and technologist who has worked with the office to integrate tech tools into the legislative process, admitted that without checks, it’s “a guaranteed way of introducing thousands of bugs into our legal system.”
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