The first AI system in the world to hold a cabinet-level government role (en.wikipedia.org)

Albania’s government has appointed Diella—an AI virtual assistant developed by the National Agency for Information Society (AKSHI) in cooperation with Microsoft—as the world’s first cabinet-level AI. Launched on the eAlbania platform in January 2025 as a text-based service and upgraded to Diella 2.0 (voice + animated avatar) by September, the system runs on Azure using OpenAI-supplied large language models with AKSHI-authored workflows and scripts that steer its citizen-facing behavior. By mid‑2025 Diella had helped citizens access over 36,000 documents and nearly 1,000 services (with document issuance still handled by the eAlbania backend). The avatar’s likeness and voice were provided under agreement by actress Anila Bisha; the system is proprietary and Albanian-language. The government appointed Diella “Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence” on 12 September 2025 and plans to gradually transfer public procurement duties to the system as part of anti‑corruption and EU accession reforms. The move is significant because it formalizes AI into executive decision-making, promising standardized, auditable processes but also raising acute risks: accountability gaps, due‑process and procurement fairness concerns, misuse of models, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Technical implications include dependence on hosted LLMs, the need for transparent, auditable pipelines and evaluation metrics, robust human-in-the-loop controls, and legal frameworks to assign responsibility for automated decisions. The appointment has already provoked political protests, underlining the governance and legitimacy challenges of operationalizing AI in government.