Politico: AI-drafted bills swamp House Legislative Counsel

The House Office of Legislative Counsel now spends more time fixing AI-drafted bills than it would take to write them from scratch, Politico reported on August 17, citing eight current and former officials who work or have worked with the office.

Requests for legislation ran 72% higher in 2025 than in the same period in 2023, per one count in the report. OLC is a team of mostly lawyers who format bills for the House. It is prohibited from using AI itself, even as its inbox fills with drafts written by it.

"It's absolutely terrifying, and no one is thinking about it yet," one staffer told Politico. Another said colleagues are "going to Claude or ChatGPT to draft the legislative language itself."

The most visible slip is on the record. In June, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act filed by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), directing Defense Department resources to the southwest border, went out with the phrase "Claude responded:" still sitting in its summary. Luna said "no AI was used to draft the actual legislation" and called it an "AI summary of the bill."

Ari Hershowitz, a lawyer and technologist who has worked with the office on integrating tools, said AI drafts that cite prior statutes incorrectly are "a guaranteed way of introducing thousands of bugs into our legal system." Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, put it plainly: "AI is good for a lot of stuff. But it's not capable of drafting legislation that you would want to enact into law."

The errors the report flags are the kind lawyers actually care about: tax credit versus deduction versus exclusion versus grant, categories that look interchangeable to a chatbot and are not. It is our second story this week involving Claude showing up in an official document where it did not belong, after a 3M expert used ChatGPT to draft a '0% at fault' defense report.