assed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2023. It was a local ordinance about water
meter replacement. Council member Ramiro Rosário was simply looking for help in
generating and articulating ideas for solving a policy problem, and ChatGPT did
well enough that the bill passed unanimously. We approve of AI assisting humans
in this manner, although Rosário should have disclosed that the bill was
written by AI before it was voted on.

Brazil was a harbinger but hardly unique. In recent years, there has been a
steady stream of attention-seeking politicians at the local and national level
introducing bills that they promote as being drafted by AI or letting AI write
their speeches for them or even vocalize them in the chamber.

The Emirati proposal is different from those examples in important ways. It
promises to be more systemic and less of a one-off stunt. The UAE has promised
to spend more than $3 billion to transform into an "AI-native" government by
2027. Time will tell if it is also different in being more hype than reality.

Rather than being a true first, the UAE's announcement is emblematic of a much
wider global trend of legislative bodies integrating AI assistive tools for
legislative research, drafting, translation, data processing, and much more.
Individual lawmakers have begun turning to AI drafting tools as they
traditionally have relied on staffers, interns, or lobbyists. The French
government has gone so far as to train its own AI model to assist with
legislative tasks.

Even asking AI to comprehensively review and update legislation would not be a
first. In 2020, the U.S. state of Ohio began using AI to do wholesale revision
of its administrative law. AI's speed is potentially a good match to this kind
of large-scale editorial project; the state's then-lieutenant governor, Jon
Husted, claims it was successful in eliminating 2.2 million words' worth of
unnecessary regulation from Ohio's code. Now a U.S. senator, Husted has recently
proposed to take the same approach to U.S. federal law, with an ideological bent
promoting AI as a tool for systematic deregulation.

The dangers of confabulation and inhumanity -- while legitimate -- aren't really
what makes the potential of AI-generated law novel. Humans make mistakes when
writing law, too. Recall that a single typo in a 900-page law nearly brought
down the massive U.S. health care reforms of the Affordable Care Act in 2015,
before the Supreme Court excused the error. And, distressingly, the citizens and
residents of nondemocratic states are already subject to arbitrary and often
inhumane laws. (The UAE is a federation of monarchies without direct elections
of legislators and with a poor record on political rights and civil liberties,
as evaluated by Freedom House.)

The primary concern with using AI in lawmaking is that it will be wielded as a
tool by the powerful to advance their own interests. AI may not fundamentally
change lawmaking, but its superhuman capabilities have the potential to
exacerbate the risks of power concentration.

AI, and technology generally, is often invoked by politicians to give their
project a patina of objectivity and rationality, but it doesn't really do any
such thing. As proposed, AI would simply give the UAE's hereditary rulers new
tools to express, enact, and enforce their preferred policies.

Mohammed's emphasis that a primary benefit of AI will be to make law faster is
also misguided. The machine may write the text, but humans will still propose,
debate, and vote on the legislation. Drafting is rarely the bottleneck in
passing new law. What takes much longer is for humans to amend, horse-trade, and
ultimately come to agreement on the content of that legislation -- even when
that politicking is happening among a small group of monarchic elites.

Rather than expeditiousness, the more important capability offered by AI is
sophistication. AI has the potential to make law more complex, tailoring it to a
multitude of different scenarios. The combination of AI's research and drafting
speed makes it possible for it to outline legislation governing dozens, even
thousands, of special cases for each proposed rule.

But here again, this capability of AI opens the door for the powerful to have
their way. AI's capacity to write complex law would allow the humans directing
it to dictate their exacting policy preference for every special case. It could
even embed those preferences surreptitiously.

Since time immemorial, legislators have carved out legal loopholes to narrowly
cater to special interests. AI will be a powerful tool for authoritarians,
lobbyists, and other empowered interests to do this at a greater scale. AI can
help automatically produce what political scientist Amy McKay has termed
"microlegislation": loopholes that may be imperceptible to human readers on the
page -- until their impact is realized in the real world.

But AI can be constrained and directed to distribute power rather than
concentrate it. For Emirati residents, the most intriguing possibility of the AI
plan is the promise to introduce AI "interactive platforms" where the public can
provide input to legislation. In experiments across locales as diverse as
Kentucky, Massachusetts, France, Scotland, Taiwan, and many others, civil
society within democracies are innovating and experimenting with ways to
leverage AI to help listen to constituents and construct public policy in a way
that best serves diverse stakeholders.

If the UAE is going to build an AI-native government, it should do so for the
purpose of empowering people and not machines. AI has real potential to improve
deliberation and pluralism in policymaking, and Emirati residents should hold
their government accountable to delivering on this promise.

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Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a
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including his latest, A HackerΓÇÖs Mind -- as well as hundreds of articles,
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Tor Project; and an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information
Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at
Inrupt, Inc.

Copyright © 2025 by Bruce Schneier.

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