Sitting in a small Ottawa government office in late 2025, I observed a policy advisor navigating through an overwhelming amount of legislative text. She entered a query into a specially designed interface rather than turning pages or searching a database, and a structured legal memo materialized in a matter of seconds. With the ease of someone who has read ten thousand legal clauses, she said, “It’s not perfect.” “But I only saved three days because of it.”
While it won’t replace legislators, artificial intelligence is subtly changing the way laws are drafted, examined, and researched. Policy staff in Canada, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and some parts of Europe are adopting AI as a drafting partner that never gets bored or whines about a deadline.
| Key Topic | Details |
|---|---|
| Focus | Government use of AI in legislative drafting and policy work |
| Purpose | Accelerate lawmaking, reduce redundancy, forecast impact |
| 2026 Trend | Growing global adoption of AI for research and bill writing |
| Key Countries Mentioned | U.S., UAE, Albania, Brazil |
| Oversight Requirement | Human review for ethics, bias, and legal consistency |
| Risks Identified | Data bias, hallucination, democratic dilution |
| Source Example | OECD, NCSL, Inter-Parliamentary Union |
The House of Representatives in the United States uses the Comparative Print Suite to precisely compare bill versions. Consider it an extreme form of legislative markup. It draws attention to what is new, what is old, and what conflicts with current statutes—things that used to require hours of work from legal staff. Legislators in Massachusetts and Alaska are experimenting with generative AI to assist in the drafting of new laws, not to replace but to slow down the process of governing.
The argument is straightforward: governments have failed to keep up with their own issues. Years frequently pass between recognizing a problem and enacting legislation to solve it. AI provides a remarkably effective means of condensing those timelines, especially when trained on legal precedents, regulatory frameworks, and public sentiment data.
The UAE has gone farther, always willing to take risks. In addition to creating new laws, their Ministry of Justice is implementing an AI-driven legislative platform that uses real-time court data to identify out-of-date statutes. AI serves more as a legislative advisor there than as a tool.
In order to incorporate EU legal directives into its national code, Albania is also utilizing AI. This is a huge undertaking that previously required literal armies of translators and drafters. It’s difficult to dispute Prime Minister Edi Rama’s description of the process as “an accelerating engine.” AI is now used by their Ministry of Justice as a sort of legal lint-roller to remove legislative overlaps.
Allowing AI to create initial drafts has a symbolic appeal. Congressman Ted Lieu of the United States filed a resolution in 2023 that was entirely composed by ChatGPT to draw attention to both its advantages and disadvantages. Lawmakers in Costa Rica followed suit. These early actions demonstrated a new level of civic possibility rather than outsourcing democracy.
More than 70% of national governments polled by the OECD by the middle of 2024 had implemented AI in some capacity to aid in the creation of internal policies. However, only a third had directly applied it to the creation of legislation. That gap conveys a message of cautious optimism tempered with worry.
I recall reading a warning from Vincent Straub, a researcher at Oxford, that many AI models still “hallucinate” when they are asked to generate factual outputs. I remembered that sentence. Not because the issue is novel, but rather because even a minor hallucination could have far-reaching legal repercussions.
Nevertheless, there is constant pressure to modernize. As public opinion changes quickly on social media, lawmakers are now expected to stay abreast of current events. Governments must act quickly; they cannot simply react thoughtfully. AI that has been trained on public engagement trends can predict public reaction to proposed legislation and provide early warnings. That responsiveness can be especially helpful in nations where public confidence in the government is brittle.
However, there is a distinction between substitution and cooperation. The AI is not a voter. It doesn’t argue. Conflicting interests between populations or regions are not balanced by it. Humans do those jobs. AI doesn’t deliberate; it just drafts.
Nearly 51% of respondents to a survey conducted in Europe said they would be amenable to AI replacing some lawmakers. That figure is intriguing and unnerving at the same time. It shows both a naive belief in technological neutrality and disillusionment with human governance.
The mere fact that the drafter is a machine does not eliminate bias. A large portion of the data used to train algorithms includes historical disparities, legislative gaps, and politically charged rulings. Though it can’t think like a legislator with context, empathy, or life experience, an AI can learn to write like a lawyer.
Nevertheless, the advantages are too great to be disregarded. In a matter of seconds, AI can synthesize legal precedents from various jurisdictions. By examining past analogs, it can predict how a proposed regulation will affect the economy. In multilingual legal drafts, it can identify linguistic errors that a group of human translators might overlook.
More governments might set up “regulatory intelligence offices” in the upcoming years, which are departments tasked with creating, evaluating, and improving legal AI models using safe national data. One such program, Project Galileo, has already been started by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
When used properly, these systems will function as co-pilots. They will make suggestions, annotate, and model. However, people still have the final say in matters like public accountability, ethical reasoning, and voting.
Furthermore, it’s possible that better questions rather than quicker legislation are the biggest advantage AI can provide. What do we lack? Who is impacted by this? Is the vocabulary inclusive? Where might this go wrong?
Good lawmakers already ask those kinds of questions. Now, even the most advanced AI tools are learning how to ask them questions.
