If you’re thinking about becoming a congressional lawyer, you might want to rethink that career choice — unless you’re okay with sifting through oodles of legislative proposals written by artificial intelligence.
Lawyers are having a hard time keeping up with a deluge of AI-drafted legislation, according to Politico.
Congressional lawyers are struggling to manage a flood of legislative proposals generated using artificial intelligence tools, many of them riddled with errors and shoddy language.
The strain on the House Office of Legislative Counsel is increasing as more congressional offices and outside groups rely on generative AI to draft legislation, according to interviews with eight current and former officials who work or have worked with the office.
They said AI’s ability to quickly generate mountains of text is forcing the OLC’s lawyers to spend significantly more time reviewing and rewriting the proposals. And in many cases, the drafts are plagued by mistakes that could ripple well beyond Washington — tying up the passage of legislation and risking lawsuits over erroneously cited statutes or incorrect legal definitions.
AI’s arrival on Capitol Hill means that the rapidly advancing technology — already threatening to disrupt software, warfare, Hollywood and myriad other industries — could soon shape laws that affect millions of Americans, in unpredictable ways.
“AI is good for a lot of stuff,” said Daniel Schuman, executive director of the nonprofit American Governance Institute, which helps modernize government technology. “But it’s not capable of drafting legislation that you would want to enact into law.”
Staffers and outside groups are “going to Claude or ChatGPT to draft the legislative language itself,” said one person who has advised office staff on the technology, who like several other people quoted in this story were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Given the errors AI tools generate, the OLC spends “more time trying to fix AI-drafted legislation than it would take for them to draft it from scratch,” the person said.
@elonmusk
— Aniruddha Salve (@AniruddhaSalve_) July 26, 2026
lawmakers are drafting kill switch legislation for frontier AI models right now. you’ve talked about AI risk seriously for years, long before most of the industry took it that seriously. curious what you think an actual working version of that switch should look like,…
House Republicans have reportedly used an AI tool called Byrd Bot to draft legislation that adheres to the Byrd Rule, a Senate procedural restriction barring “extraneous” non-budgetary provisions from reconciliation bills.
A new AI tool, called the Byrd Bot, was developed by the conservative Republican Study Committee to help House Republicans draft legislation that follows the Byrd Rule, a Senate provision that allows senators to remove “extraneous” provisions from budget reconciliation bills. The Byrd Bot is used for testing new ideas against the Byrd Rule and for generating suggested changes to legislation text. The hope, they say, is to avoid the frustrating process where House provisions are jettisoned at the last minute due to Senate rules.
The Byrd Bot is the latest example of AI being used in the corridors of power, and the first AI tool to be used in the legislative drafting process. The House previously introduced the Comparative Print Suite in 2022, an AI tool used to compare different versions of legislation and to suggest potential amendments. Some members of Congress have also delivered speeches written and voiced by AI.
However, both sides of the aisle have made use of artificial intelligence to create legislation. Critics point out that AI-drafted bills are typically rife with errors. Democrat Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25) argued that relying on the technology “could introduce errors, create unintended legal consequences, or result in language that does not accurately reflect a member’s policy intent.”
Kay Firth-Butterfield, CEO of Good Tech Advisory told Transformer News, “We are leaping ahead into a world where AI creates our laws without actually agreeing that AI should create our laws. We’re simply passive passengers on this.”
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