Congressional staffers and outside groups are using Claude and ChatGPT to draft legislation. The lawyers who check that work cannot keep up. Owen Dahlkamp reported the strain on the House Office of Legislative Counsel for Politico on Monday. He drew on interviews with eight current and former officials who work or have worked with the office.

One person who has advised the office on the technology gave Politico the line that carries the story. The office spends “more time trying to fix AI-drafted legislation than it would take for them to draft it from scratch,” the person said. Politico granted anonymity to several people because they lacked authorisation to speak on the record.

Four congressional staffers involved in drafting told Politico that AI use is becoming routine in the House. “It’s absolutely terrifying,” one House staffer said, “and no one is thinking about it yet.”

What the office does

The Office of Legislative Counsel is the quality-control layer between an idea and a statute. “When we talk about Congress’s ability to legislate, we are talking about this office,” Marci Harris of the POPVOX Foundation told Politico.

The volume is already large. In the 118th Congress the office prepared 30,494 bills, 188 percent more than the 10,564 actually introduced. That comes from testimony in March by legislative counsel Warren Burke. The office also prepared 21,484 amendments, up 46 percent on the 114th Congress.

Burke’s figures also show who does that work. The office had 78 attorneys and 23 support staff in the first session of this Congress. Attorney numbers are up 59 percent since the 116th. Average experience has fallen 22 percent over the same stretch, and 58 percent of attorneys now have less than a decade of service.

Where AI goes wrong in a bill

The errors described are small and consequential. Wade Ballou led the office from 2016 to 2024. He told Politico that AI struggles to tell whether a pot of money should be a “tax credit, tax deduction, tax exclusion or a grant”, and that AI will miss those nuances.

Definitions cause similar trouble. A bill that defines a state as only the 50 states can exclude Washington DC and tribal nations from a federal programme. A person who works with the office gave Politico that example.

Citations are the third failure. Ari Hershowitz is a lawyer and technologist who has worked with the office. He called incorrect statutory references “a guaranteed way of introducing thousands of bugs into our legal system”.

Daniel Schuman of the American Governance Institute put the general case. “AI is good for a lot of stuff,” he told Politico. “But it’s not capable of drafting legislation that you would want to enact into law.”

Official pipelines have buckled under machine-generated submissions before. In August we reported that someone filed 55 software vulnerabilities in days, and that 54 were AI-invented.

Two different growth figures

Politico cited a 72 percent rise in requests, drawn from Burke’s testimony last year. That figure covers the first 60 days of this Congress. It compares 5,623 requests against 3,271 in the same window of the previous Congress.

Burke’s most recent testimony reports a different rate over a longer window. Across the first 13 months of this Congress the office received 23,239 requests. The comparable figure for the 118th was 21,979. That is a rise of 5.7 percent.

On AI specifically, Burke was direct in March. “In the near term, we are bracing for AI to expand our workload,” he wrote. He added that text produced by outside entities, human or computer, often takes significantly longer to review and revise. Burke declined to comment for Politico’s article.

The office is testing its own AI

The office has organised a group of staff to evaluate Microsoft Copilot, as authorised by the House. The stated aim is improving efficiencies such as legal research, according to Burke’s testimony.

It already runs one tool of its own. The Comparative Print Suite uses natural language processing to show exactly how a bill would change the US Code. Hershowitz described it to Politico as the first AI tool in the House. It returns an error when it cannot place a change with confidence. “There’s no hallucinations,” he said.

Charlotte Lee of Granicus helped design that tool. She described the wider arrangement to Politico. “Members and interest groups get to write things with AI, but then leg counsel themselves can’t use [commercially available] AI,” she said. “There’s a complete incongruency.”

What has not been established

Politico reported that no bill voted on by either chamber has turned out to be entirely AI-crafted. The evidence so far concerns AI-drafted bills arriving at the office, not statutes leaving Congress.

Disclosure is patchy by nature. One staffer told Politico that people who use AI tend not to talk about it, and that it still feels taboo. Labelling rules elsewhere have landed unevenly too. Under the EU AI Act, as we reported this month, an AI-written article needs no label while a proofread email does.

One incident is public. Representative Anna Paulina Luna drew criticism in June over an amendment summary generated with Claude, though she said she had not used AI to write the amendment itself. “Not a shocker. Most staff use it,” she said, adding later that she had told her staff to double check. Mike Pearl of Gizmodo reported that she later deleted one post on the episode and replaced it.

Two members of the Committee on House Administration gave statements. “AI cannot replace the skilled and dedicated professionals in the Office of Legislative Counsel,” said Representative Joe Morelle. Representative Norma Torres said responsibility for introduced legislation rests with members and their staff, and “cannot be outsourced to a chatbot”.

The wider AI push on Capitol Hill

Congress has been circling the technology from several directions this year. It spends nine of ten AI dollars with OpenAI. House Democrats want answers from OpenAI and Anthropic on rogue agents.

Legislation is moving as well. A bill from Ted Lieu and Jerry Moran would create an emergency kill switch for AI systems. That followed a rogue agent breaching Hugging Face in July.

Ballou sees a narrower role for the technology. AI can help lawmakers process information, he told Politico, but cannot replace the art of drafting. Hershowitz expects the volume problem to worsen either way. “You had a problem that was already at 10,” he said. “Now you multiply it by 100.”

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.