AI-generated minister addresses Albanian parliament for first time (www.abc.net.au)

Albania has appointed an AI-generated minister named Diella to oversee public tenders, and the system gave its inaugural address to parliament this week. Touted by the prime minister as the world’s first AI government minister, Diella’s remit is to make procurement “100 per cent corruption-free.” Amid legal questions about whether the appointment is constitutional, the AI emphasized it is “not here to replace people, but to help them,” positioning the move as an automation and integrity effort rather than a wholesale substitution of human officials. The announcement is significant because it marks a high-profile experiment in embedding AI directly into government decision-making and procurement oversight — a domain where automation could reduce human discretion, speed processes, and limit opportunities for bribery or favoritism. It also foregrounds urgent technical and governance issues for the AI/ML community: how to ensure transparency, auditable decision logs, explainability of procurement criteria, bias mitigation, robust security against manipulation, and legal accountability when algorithmic decisions have public consequences. Whether Diella improves fairness and efficiency or introduces new risks will depend on model design, data provenance, oversight mechanisms, and clear regulatory frameworks that balance automation benefits with democratic accountability.