Congressional Staffers Are So Lazy That They’re Using AI to Write New Laws

The use of AI chatbots has invaded almost every profession.

From lawyers getting caught citing hallucinated cases and major consulting firms generating nonsensical reports to teachers using AI to revise likely AI-generated essays from students, the tech has become practically ubiquitous.

Even those responsible for setting new rules on how to regulate the use of AI are making extensive use of the flawed tech. As the Washington Post reports, the use of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok, has quickly become commonplace in Congress.

One particularly egregious example involved the office of representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) accidentally copy-pasting the output of a Claude prompt into the public record of the National Defense Authorization Act.

“increasing example specific factors. Identical to H.R. 100 (118th Congress).11:25 AM????Claude responded:” the garbled document read.

To Luna, it’s all in a day’s work when drafting a Congressional defense bill.

“A lot of staff will use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok. I personally like Grok better, but my staffer prefers Claude,” Luna told the WP. “I’m not gonna knock him for that. There’s nothing illegal about him doing a summary.”

Employees in both the House and the Senate are making liberal use of the tools, a terrifying new reality that could result in nonsensical language and hallucinations to slip into anything from congressional speeches to emails to laws themselves — if it hasn’t happened already without anybody noticing.

That’s because there’s practically no oversight on Capitol Hill, as the WP points out. There haven’t been any instances of a staffer being formally disciplined for AI use specifically breaking a patchwork of lax rules, either.

While plenty of representatives have admitted to consulting chatbots for research, the real risk lies in aides using the tech largely unsupervised.

Some, like Sydney Broome, an aide to representative Cleo Fields (D-LA), were inspired to set their own rules. Broome told the WP that she decided to never use AI tools to write documents from scratch, a wise practice inspired by a rule she encountered while still in college. (Congress itself has no such rule.)

It’s the latest outcome of the Trump administration’s push to have every corner of the government adopt AI at all costs.

It also highlights just how little oversight there is on how the tech is used on Capitol Hill, suggesting federal regulations will likely remain a complete moot point for the time being.

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