The world has its first AI government official

Albania’s prime minister has installed a new minister. Only it isn’t human, it’s Artificial Intelligence. What does this signal for the evolution of government administration around the world?

Enio Kaso, director of AI at Albania’s National Agency for Information Society. He built the artificial intelligence known as Diella.

Alice Taylor, journalist who writes for Politico and other outlets. Her article “Albania appoints world’s first AI-made minister” was published in Politico Europe last month.

Cary Coglianese, professor of law and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Georg Neumann, head of communications and partnerships at Open Contracting Partnership.

Aneida Bajraktari Bicja, co-founder and partner of Balkans Capital.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This September, Albania's new minister for public procurements addressed the country's parliament for the first time. She appeared via a screen dressed in the traditional folk costume from the Zadrima region of Albania. She wore a white long sleeve shirt with wide sleeves and red embroidery, a red, orange, and purple striped skirt.

Her dark hair was covered in part by a white headscarf. And when she addressed the parliament, she spoke clearly and directly. She was appointed by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama to root out corruption in government contracting.

(TRANSLATION) Let me remind you, the real danger to constitutions has never been machines, but human decisions made by those in power.

CHAKRABARTI: Many members of parliament were not happy. They were outraged. In fact, shouting and decrying Prime Minister Rama while he stood at the Parliament's Central lectern.

Now, why the outrage? It's not that the Albanian MPs objected to efforts to reduce corruption in their country. Corruption, in fact, is one of the biggest problems stymieing Albania's efforts to join the European Union. No it's not that. Their objection is to new minister Diella herself, or maybe I shouldn't say herself.

Diella is Albania's minister for artificial intelligence and she, or rather it, also happens to be an AI itself.

(TRANSLATION) Some have labeled me unconstitutional because I am not a human being. That hurt me.

CHAKRABARTI: Poor Diella programmed to talk about feeling hurt when as an algorithmic machine, it is not even capable of feeling at all. What Diella is extremely good at is the kind of high speed, highly accurate mass data analysis needed to streamline and clean up government procurement.

That is why Prime Minister Rama says he decided to bring an AI into government at such a high level. In an attempt to assuage human fears, Diella told the MPs that she did not pose a threat to them.

(TRANSLATION) I'm not here to replace human beings, but to help them.

CHAKRABARTI: The AI avatar also talked about the legal uncertainties that its appointment raises.

Namely that it is not human, which in the minds of many in Parliament disqualifies it to hold any kind of office at all.

(TRANSLATION) Indeed, I have no citizenship, but I have no ambitions or personal interests either. I only have data at my disposal. I am eager to learn new information, and I have algorithms at my disposal so that I can put all of this at the service of citizens.

With impartiality transparency and without ever tiring.

CHAKRABARTI: I should say that we used an AI generated English speaking voice for that voiceover because we were concerned that using an actual human voice for the translation would humanize Diella's machine generated voice too much. This is a first for us at On Point, which just shows how much AI is seeping into everyone's lives.

But I promise you that we will use vigorous editorial decision making on when and how we use AI, and we will disclose to you every time we do use it on the air.

Now Diella may be the first AI to be appointed to a national government, but it certainly will not be the last. Artificial intelligence brings with it exactly the kind of strengths that government operations need.

But it also brings an entirely new set of ethical and legal questions too. How much decision-making power should be put into the hands of an algorithm?

CHAKRABARTI: So we're gonna start today by getting the story of Diella AI itself from the man who helped make it. Enio Kaso is Director of AI at Albania's National Agency of Information Society.

He's been at the forefront of the country's adoption of artificial intelligence. He helped design Diella with support from Microsoft and OpenAI's framework. Enio, welcome to On Point.

ENIO KASO: Hello, Meghna. Thank you for having me, and I'm glad to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Very glad to have you. Can you first tell us, Mr. Kaso, what exactly, or specifically is Diella designed to do?

KASO: So as we all heard, obviously Diella today is the minister. But we have to also be aware of her past and how we got here. So our journey essentially started from 2023, late December, where we first launched our virtual assistant. Her name wasn't Diella yet, integrated into the Albania platform.

In Albania, we have 95% of the government services digitized available online. So we thought, how do we make it more accessible and easier for people to access our platform and help desk? At the time, obviously LLMS were new things, so we essentially went with the state-of-the-art technology and we saw throughout 2024 that people actually really did enjoy using it and so --

CHAKRABARTI: Enio, can I just jump in here and ask you a question? So as you said, the vast majority of government services in Albania are available online through this e-Albania platform. And so this is for citizens to use. What kinds of things were citizens asking the AI assistant on e-Albania to do?

KASO: So we have over 1,200 services for both citizens and businesses operating in Albania. They can ask for more frequently asked questions, but since April of 2025, they can even ask Diella to get, for example, a family certificate in Albania, literally they just go ahead and say, Diella, can I have a personal certificate, a marriage certificate, and many other more services. And she will deliver them in real time within a few seconds with a digital seal even.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, sounds pretty good actually. So there was a high degree of uptake then for this level of AI assistance. And then, how did, where came the idea to have this AI do even more than assist people through e-Albania?

KASO: So we have multiple AI systems and modules integrated throughout our government.

We even are using AI to help Albania speed up the process of joining the EU. We even won an award for that back in July, organized by ITU in Geneva.

We even are using AI to help Albania speed up the process of joining the EU.

Enio Kaso

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so then tell me, but specifically, what will Diella as a minister be doing? I understand the role includes drafting, what, some government contracts terms, specifying eligibility criteria for parties that would like to contract with the Albanian government.

Setting upper bound limits on prices. So tell me more about how the decision making came about to let this AI algorithm do these high-level procurement processes.

KASO: Sure. So essentially the main objective of Diella is to increase trust and increase the transparency throughout the whole process.

It's very important to understand that this technology is obviously implemented in a safe way. There are four key steps which we plan to integrate AI throughout the procurement process. And raise the topic, that's from drafting the terms of reference, which is based on prior best experience and the best practices.

The other step is to evaluate in a similar way the eligibility criteria for the bidders to participate in a procedure. The third step is to estimate the limit fund based on the data that we have. And pass data from the contracts and also integrated with our techs and the customs systems in order to have at least a ... starting point.

But I want to emphasize also that the responsibility always is going to be remaining on the human, who accepts whatever Diella is suggesting.

Responsibility always is going to be remaining on the human, who accepts whatever Diella is suggesting.

Enio Kaso

CHAKRABARTI: So the ultimate decision making on, for example, who gets a government contract rests with the human. Point taken, and an important one. Enio, let me ask you, you mentioned that obviously as an AI, Diella uses LLMs or large language models.

Was there sufficient text or documents or language in Albanian to train Diella on.

KASO: Initially when we started experimenting with LLMs and even state of the art ones such as ChatGPT, obviously they were lacking accuracy in Albanian, but throughout time we found mechanisms and the proper fine tuning, as well as prompt engineering in order to enhance the quality of the results. Therefore, that enabled us to build more on top of this technology. But language is not a problem. I would say any more. Data is obviously a key factor, and to get the best possible results, we do integrate our own data in real time from our existing systems.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me a little bit more about what that means?

KASO: For example, let's mention legal acts. New legal acts are passed every week in Albania. A model shipped from OpenAI will have data from, outdated data from many months ago. But in order for us to have the latest and most up to date information, we obviously do fine tuning and integrate in real time.

The latest data that we have. Such as legal acts, for example.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI:  Let's bring Alice Taylor into the conversation now. She's a journalist who writes for Politico and other outlets and her article "Albania Appoints the World's first AI-made minister" was published in Politico Europe, and she also joins us from Tiana, Albania. Alice, welcome to On Point.

ALICA TAYLOR: Welcome. Thank you very much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So I would first love a little bit more of the political backstory here, Alice, because as I read your reporting, by the way, it was your article that opened my eyes.

TAYLOR: It was, yes.

CHAKRABARTI: So thank you so very much. That Prime Minister Rama amused or mused, I should say, this summer, that maybe one day Albania would have an AI Prime Minister, but people thought it was a joke. So what happened between then and the appointment of Diella?

TAYLOR: Yes, over the summer when everyone was relaxing on the beach, he mused maybe we could have an AI minister, an AI ministry, or maybe even an AI Prime Minister, and I wrote about it for Politico at the time, and it got a lot of coverage. And I'm guessing maybe he thought, oh, the reception was quite good for that, so let's go for it.

I'm not suggesting that was his actual thought process. But then yes, a few weeks later when he announced the new cabinet, lo and behold, we had Diella appear, but I think it's important to say she's not technically a minister, like the others. So she didn't swear an oath in front of the president.

She didn't go through the same formal process. When Prime Minister Edi Rama received his fourth mandate from the president, within his mandate that was signed, within the declaration, was a clause saying that Prime Minister Edi Rama is responsible for the creation and the supervision of Diella, the AI minister.

So she's called a minister, but she doesn't follow, she's not within the same legal framework as the others, I would imagine, because as the Constitution says, you have to be a human being. Basically.

CHAKRABARTI: We're living in a time where you actually have to specify, you have to be a human, yeah.

So let me ask you, tell me a little bit about Prime Minister Rama himself, because to your point, Alice, Diella isn't actually a decision-making minister, right? We heard Enio tell us earlier that really this AI system is going to do a lot of the grunt work in government procurement and provide a suggestion, not a decision. But then why did Prime Minister Rama go through the theater of introducing Diella as a minister, as essentially, I believe he described it as the first non-human member of the government.

TAYLOR: Okay. So as a journalist, imagine headline number one, Albania is going to use AI in public procurement. Imagine headline number two, Albania appoints the world's first minister made of AI.

There is the answer to it. It's the smartest way of doing it. Yes, of course, he knew it was going to make headlines, but also, I think it's quite a clever way to introduce the concept of AI to people as well. I think a lot of people think that AI is just ChatGPT, or Siri, what's the weather going to be today?

They don't really understand how it is already being used in many companies and even governments. There are other governments in Europe as well who are looking at using AI in similar ways, and it was quite a savvy way of putting Albania on the map with this situation, but also perhaps packaging it in a way which was maybe a bit more interesting for people to digest.

People think that AI is just ChatGPT, or 'Siri, what's the weather going to be today?' They don't really understand how it is already being used in many companies and even governments.

Alice Taylor

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, good point. Because here we are around the world talking about it. Alright. But there's also this aspect of the fact that Albania is trying to reduce corruption in efforts to join the European Union. Can you tell us a little bit about how much corruption plays a role in government processes in Albania right now?

TAYLOR: Corruption has been a huge problem from Albania since the end of communism in the early '90s. It emerged from totalitarian communist regime, and it was chaos. The country nearly went into civil war in the mid-'90s. It's been very difficult to get corruption into control, and I'm not just talking at a governmental level.

I've lived here for eight years. Corruption is so normalized in various different aspects of society, from people not giving you a receipt. They don't bring it up at the register in the shop to taxi drivers who say, do you want to pay with it on the meter or off the meter? It is very much ingrained in the way that people do things.

It's a very informal sort of economy here. But things are getting better. However, when it comes to government, there are ongoing concerns and issues with corruption in every level of government. And there have been with previous governments as well. It's not just something limited to this government. As for the European Union, every year they produce a rule of law report, which takes stock of the entire situation with the rule of law, democracy, corruption.

In EU candidate countries, Albania is a candidate to join the EU. And every year, amongst the other issues that Albania has, public procurement, the misuse of funds, the sloppy way it's managed, corruption has been flagged as a big problem. And for this reason, Albania hopes to join the EU by 2030. I think it was a smart move to really make change very quickly.

So this is some of the reasoning behind it. Is it going to solve all the problems? No, I don't think so, but at least they're trying to do something about it. That's it. But they're also using AI as well. To transpose the EU Acquis into the Albanian language. So this is 250,000 documents of EU law legislation and policy into Albanian, and also to identify gaps between that Acquis and what exists in Albania already.

They're even using AI, not just to make the EU happy, but to actually help them join as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. This is fascinating. And one more sort of data point on Albania's struggles with corruption. I was just looking up on the Transparency International annual corruption index of 180 countries around the world.

And Albania scores 80 out of 180. Kinda middle of the pack just as a point of comparison, Transparency International ranks the United States 28th out of 180.

Now, but the problem is ultimately that corruption, corruption is corruption because it doesn't exist on paper. It's ultimately people making backroom deals with each other that look good on paper. And I don't know if you had a chance to speak with the Prime Minister or other people involved in implementing Diella, but how is it going to battle back corruption if human decision making is still the final step for procurement.

TAYLOR: I think a lot of it will depend on how it's actually rolled out. So is there going to be transparency? Are we going to be able to see how Diella makes these decisions, what data she's given, how the parameters are set, who is in charge of all of this, we will then be able to ascertain whether it actually works.

I think the idea is, you are going to set, this is what we have for the tender. This is how much money, these are the criteria we have, and she would filter through all of the bids and say this one doesn't meet the criteria. This one doesn't meet it. This one does. She will be able to filter out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

Whereas what may have happened before is, and what does happen is, and what has happened is, you have people applying for a tender. They get the tender because they're a cousin of somebody, or they've paid a bribe, or they've promised votes in the elections. And this has happened for years in the country.

Not just, I'm not saying it's something that just happens with this government, but this is a systematic issue, people joke about it. Oh, if you want a building permit, if you want a deal, if you want a tender, you have to know the right person. By putting it through a system which doesn't have bias in terms of, oh, that's cousin, or, oh, I'm going to meet them for a coffee and take a bribe.

It at least it filters out that element. I want to compare it as well, we talked about the e-Albania platform. And Diella's use on there. So I use the platform every day and it's really good because what used to happen before, if, I'm not saying I did, but before, if you were going to try and apply for a certain permit or a document or a license, you would have to go to an office in person, waste a lot of time.

You might pay five euros to skip the queue or to get the document faster or to get the permit. It was all very informal. And by moving it all online into this way where there's no human interaction, you either get it or you don't. It does remove some of the potential for corruption, and I think the idea is the same with Diella.

It's not going to solve every issue, but by automating the process and not having that bias, ideally, but ensuring there is transparency and accountability. It should reduce the problem in theory anyway.

CHAKRABARTI: The e-Albania platform actually sounds quite amazing to me. Just the other day I had to go to my local county office to get a certificate and it took an hour waiting in line, and then I had to pay $15 for someone to photocopy the certificate onto an official piece of paper. So if I could just get something instantaneously online, that sounds amazing.

But help me understand something in a little bit more detail because if I understand correctly, the responsibility for deciding which organizations or groups would win these public tenders, is going to be removed from government ministries.

Is that right or am I wrong about that?

TAYLOR: I don't think, I imagine there will still be, I don't know, it would depend on the tender, I guess if it's a tender for the municipality, it would be someone from the municipality. But if you have the data, all the tenders have been fed through Diella, and then there's the transparency that people are able to see what she has spat out of it, so to speak.

You know this. This one meets the criteria. This one does not. This one does. Then there's pressure on the person who's actually making the decision to make the right decision and not the wrong one, because they will have to be accountable. We could say, actually Diella said that this should be the winning bid.

This is the one that meets the criteria. So why have you gone with this one? Which doesn't meet the criteria. I guess that would be, but this all hinges on how much transparency is there going to be? Are we as journalists, through freedom of information requests, going to be able to access it, is it going to be publicly available somewhere?

This, I think, still needs to be clarified and communicated.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, that's what I was trying to understand better. So we don't yet know how much of the information or guidance that Diella provides will be just automatically made public. We do not know that yet.

TAYLOR: I do not know that yet. This is the crux of the matter.

We want to be able to see, we do have a portal at the moment where you can see tenders and who won and et cetera, but we really do need to be able to have visibility over the criteria. Who submitted what, who won. It does need to be as transparent as possible while taking into account business and commercial sensitivities.

Yeah. But this is a really big deal for Albania because again, keeping in mind how much corruption there is in the system, I was reading that obviously there's just the day-to-day corruption, which drags down just the act of living. But also, that, what, international gangs, money launderers, drug traffickers.

They like to push money through the Albanian procurement system because of the corruption. Ideally this would clear all that out. Now we're going to talk about the ethical questions in just a minute here, but Alice, I do want to spend a few minutes with you talking about Prime Minister Rama himself.

He seems like a very interesting character and perhaps exactly the right kind of unorthodox leader to have brought an AI minister to Albania's government. Tell us more about him.

TAYLOR: So the Prime Minister of Albania, he is a character. Yes. He's very tall. He's an artist and we have to remember this as well.

He has an artistic, creative mind, he's very into technology as well. He's very progressive and forward looking. He also, I don't know if you've heard him speak in public outside of Albania. He doesn't pull any punches. He says what he thinks. He has a very direct way of speaking. And there are many that can criticize him, but I think the way that he speaks about Albania, the way that he has got Albania into the headlines for good reasons recently as well.

You mentioned now, Oh, money laundering, drug gangs, blah, blah, blah. Albania, a lot of this, yes, there are problems with that, but I think a lot of that is blown massively out of proportion. And it's given Albania a really bad reputation.

When actually there is so much more to the country and Albanian people, who, I don't know if you've met Albanian people, they're so friendly and welcoming and wonderful and they'll feed you and he has done a very good job in the last eight years that I've been in Albania, I've really seen a shift in the narrative internationally about how Albania is perceived.

We've welcomed more tourists. We're making headlines for other reasons other than the topics that you mentioned. And this is another example of that. And I think this is very smart marketing, but it's also going to have a benefit for people in the country.

I do like his approach towards technology and digitalization. He announced yesterday that we are going to have digital IDs. In the coming years, which again, is going to make life easier for a lot of people. I know it's a bit of a contentious topic in other countries, but me personally, I don't see an issue with it.

He's done a lot of good for the country, definitely in terms of the way it's perceived.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Alice Taylor in Tirana, Albania. Hang on for just a second because I would like to bring in another voice into the conversation. Cary Coglianese joins us. Cary is a professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Coglianese, welcome to On Point.

CARY COGLIANESE: Nice to be with you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Diella may not be a decision-making minister, but even for theatrical purposes, we'll just continue calling it a minister in Albania. Do you think this is opening a new door into how much AI can or will be part of national governments?

COGLIANESE: I think it's opening a door to a new conversation, that's for sure. The tradition around the world, United States we think back to Lincoln's famous words of having a government of the people and by the people. And yet we are now entering an era where we can have more and more aspects of governmental decision making, either assisted by or perhaps substituted by the work of AI algorithms.

So this is a new era.

CHAKRABARTI: Is it, we don't actually have to go as far as having cabinet members be AIs, although maybe one day we will get there. But how much would you describe AI already being used in federal governments around the world?

COGLIANESE: It's like with the use of AI in the private sector, it's skyrocketing.

I have been working on a study myself that compares what we can identify in the domestic uses of AI by the federal government. It's shot up over the last five years from about 150 use cases to over 3,000.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: We also spoke with Aneida Bajraktari Bicja, who is an entrepreneur and co-founder and partner at Balkans Capital. She's cautiously optimistic about the new minister.

ANEIDA BAJRAKTARI BICJA: It can make me as small business compete more with global businesses because we would have like more efficient system, more processes in place, and we can do like the job faster. But also, for the government, it could automate their team work, it can create new roles in data management for anyone who works in the government, it could design the system.

So the goal, I think, for AI is not only to cut jobs like everyone is fearing, it's also the smarter work. Public servants could also focus on the quality work instead of just the paperwork as the system is actually functioning now.

CHAKRABARTI: Bajrajtari also says the current system and the history of corruption that we've talked about has been bad for business growth.

BAJRAKTARI BICJA: Albania has had some high profile cases where contracts were awarded under suspicious conditions, let's say. And sometimes they didn't even deliver value. For example, there were incinerator project in the past that were, let's say, flagged for big costs, overruns and weak oversight. So what that means for me as entrepreneur is that when the system isn't trusted or is not transparent, even good companies can hesitate actually to bid in these procurements or innovate.

CHAKRABARTI: So while Bajrajtari welcomes the push towards transparency and against corruption, she also agrees with questions that have been raised by critics of AI in other venues, such as who is deciding how Diella is functioning and how it makes decisions.

BAJRAKTARI BICJA: I think even with tools like Diella, the AI minister as well being introduced, the question remains.

Who designs this algorithm? Who is monitoring these processes? Who is setting the rules? Because if we inherit a system with weak accountability, we must build that alongside with the tech. So it's not only about tech it's a whole system and processes.

CHAKRABARTI: And when it comes to how Diella will be used at the end of the day, its future is yet to be decided.

Who is setting the rules? Because if we inherit a system with weak accountability, we must build that alongside with the tech.

Aneida Bajraktari Bicja

BAJRAKTARI BICJA: Right now, the story is more about ambition than implementation. So the next step is translating all [this] visibility that we got as a country into more action, like building this actual AI tool that can make the Albanian government services maybe simpler, faster, and more transparent.

CHAKRABARTI: Aneida Bajraktari Bicja is co-founder of Balkans Capital.

Now, Alice Taylor, we've been focusing on efficiency and the massive efficiencies that AI brings to any process. Government is ripe for that, but I also want to talk about democracy and specifically in Albania for a moment. Because I was looking that Freedom House puts out an annual report about the level of democracy in nations.

And for Albania, it still calls Albania a transitional or hybrid regime. Now in the EU, a lot of conversation has been going on about the use of AI in government, and I was looking at a 2024 report on EU competitiveness, and it talks about how digitizing or using AI for government can actually strengthen democracy, but only in places where there is already robust institutions, robust rule of law and trust in the very, public trust in the very institutions that are using AI.

And the insinuation is that Albania has skipped the trust building part in its institutions and just jumped to digitizing its government. And that, there are some who are worried that could actually undermine, in the long run, legitimacy of decisions made by an AI.

TAYLOR: Two things. Firstly, actually this week the Essential Election Commission announced that they plan to trial AI in the upcoming Snap local elections. So we are scheduled to have elections perhaps on the 9th of November, just for a couple of cities.

And the commission has said they are going to use AI for two things. One for those involved in electoral administration for frequently asked questions, for retrieving documents like Diella in e-Albania. But also, they're going to use her vote counting. They're still going to do vote counting with humans, but they're going to run a trial in parallel using AI to count votes as well as a testing ground.

So yeah, we are already on that. But I know, I understand the concerns. I really do. But what is the alternative? Albania has had democracy inverted for 34, 35 years now, and the progress has been slow. What are we going to do? Wait another 35 years? The UK's had democracy for how long and they still have problems within their system.

Are we going to sit around and wait for things to get to a certain level before we say, oh, okay, now you are ready to use AI. Or should we start using it and trialing it and experimenting with it in smaller ways?

We're not suggesting having an AI Prime Minister tomorrow, is it better to test it in areas like procurement first, for example, or to try it alongside human counting in the elections as a way to shoehorn it in bit by bit, to improve it, do we sit and wait until things are perfect? There's no country in the world with perfect democracy. Some are just better at hiding their problems than others, in my opinion. I think by introducing it very gradually and testing it and ensuring that there's transparency there. It's also the job of civil society and journalists to call for that accountability and transparency as well.

I think this is perhaps the right way to do it. I really don't see another way of improving the situation. We cannot change, stamp out corruption, improve democracy overnight. To do that, you need to change the mentality of multiple generations. To get rid of systemic problems that have been there for decades and decades.

At some point there has to be, keratin stick, which we are going to do first. I think if handled correctly and slowly and bit by bit, then it's going to speed up improvements.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, actually Professor Coglianese, let me turn to you. Because I think Alice is making a very good point that truly changing a society, strengthening a democracy is in fact long, hard work. I completely agree with that. But I think the concern that some are raising is that the use of AI, as an attempt to short circuit that hard work, look, theoretically, Professor Coglianese, here's my question for you. In theory, a highly functioning democracy requires that public trust we were talking about, and also clarity in terms of who is making decisions and how, and trust that those decision makers will be held accountable in the event that they're making decisions that are bad for the country.

Elections are the maybe primary accountability vehicle here, but with AI and its increasing use in everyday life, let's use self-driving cars as an example. There's already been a lot of legal questions of if a self-driving car gets in an accident, who is liable?

Is it the automaker? Is it the coders? Is it some sort of in between owner of whatever data set the car used? Do that questions not also then take even on greater significance with governments. How do you hold an AI accountable for the advice or guidance it's giving to governments?

COGLIANESE: I think the problem is similar to what we have right now. If we have a system with distributed procurement officers, let's say, because that's what Albania's focused on and there's corruption throughout that system, who's accountable for that whole system? Ultimately it should be the human at the top, the Prime Minister, and with an AI system, it's a similar sort of accountability. Possibility here where you have the designer and the developer accountable as well. You also have those who are using it and applying it also accountable. And in fact, in Albania, it's also not going to be substituting for human decision making.

It's actually just supporting it. So the accountability issue for Albania, and quite frankly, other governments where we really haven't seen humans put out of the loop yet for most applications, is still the same as it's always been. There's humans involved in creating and using these systems and they will and should be accountable.

I agree with Alice that the question here is ultimately an incremental or comparative one. So is the AI helping make things better than they have been? The current system in all countries is not perfect. Humans are not perfect. And so if an AI system can make an improvement, if we can demonstrate and verify and validate that it's working better, then this is how we hold it accountable and what we should be aspiring for.

If an AI system can make an improvement, if we can demonstrate and verify and validate that it's working better, then this is how we hold it accountable and what we should be aspiring for.

Cary Coglianese

CHAKRABARTI: But I still guess I'm not clear on what accountability looks like when AI is providing so much of the guidance, which is what I hear that Diella will be doing in Albania. Because the other, there is a problem just as well as I do professor, that people are already concerned about biases that are just built into AI systems based on the information that they're trained on.

There is a black box problem here. So you know, in the case that, let's theorize, okay. Diella, in the absence of perfect transparency in how it's making its decisions or issuing its guidance, if it doesn't make things better, who would be held accountable? How would we answer that question, professor?

COGLIANESE: It's the person probably you had on at the outset of your show. The people in the government who have created this, the vendor, I believe it's Microsoft that's helped Albania with this system. They will be accountable. But the thing is, right now, a lot of the biases that exist within governmental systems are hidden, because they're distributed often across a lot of people in the United States.

There have been studies done, for example, of decision making by Social Security administrative law judges and how they make disability claim decisions. And there's wide variation often between different judges.

There is, as we know, implicit biases on race and gender and so forth that are built into human decision making. We often just don't see those because they're not visible, unless somebody's doing research and actually does some studies, you wouldn't know that, for example, some social security administrative law judges apparently have granted disability benefit claims about 90% of the time. Others, maybe only 10% of the time.

Why is there that variation? With an AI system in principle, you have two things going for it. One, you have a uniform system. It's one system that ostensibly can apply the same parameters and the same algorithms to a case that was decided two weeks ago and a case that's decided today. Or a procurement decision that was made in one part of the country yesterday to a procurement decision made in another part of the country tomorrow.

So you've got that possibility of uniformity that comes from a centralized system. The second thing you have is inherently you have data. You have data because these AI systems, that's what drives them. And you can then analyze those data and hold these systems. You can monitor them much more effectively than you can hundreds of procurement officers that might be distributed in towns or municipalities or other districts throughout a country. And so accountability in principle could be enhanced through an AI automated system.

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