"Minister Diella Will See You Now"
Albania just hired a bot to run public tenders. What could possibly go wrong?
This is the third article in three days. Third. Apparently, the world has conspired to make sure I don't get a break. If it's not assassinations, murders on buses, or whispers of World War 3, it's Albania proudly announcing that they've appointed a chatbot as a minister. At this point, I'm starting to suspect someone upstairs is trolling me personally.
(Full disclosure: I actually left this draft sitting for a couple of days and only came back to finish editing on the 15th. I was so fed up with the news cycle that I had to reset my brain by watching literal pigs race for charity. Yes, that’s a real thing. And honestly? Far more dignified than most politicians.)
So yes: on 12 September 2025, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama introduced the world to Diella (meaning "Sun" in Albanian). Diella's new role? Minister of Tendering. The pitch: unlike humans, Diella can't be bribed, threatened, or wined-and-dined by your cousin's shady construction company. Finally! An incorruptible official… brought to you by the same kind of tech that still struggles to draw a human hand without adding six extra fingers.
The big sell: anti-corruption by chatbot
Albania has a corruption problem. Their Transparency International CPI score has been hovering in the low 40s, better than their 1990s chaos days, but still grim. Procurement scandals have cost them EU credibility, so the government's looking for a silver bullet. And what's shinier than an AI minister?
They're not starting from scratch. This is essentially an upgrade of e-Albania, a virtual assistant that's been online since January 2025. Diella just happens to have been given a fancy Albanian name and shoved into a ministerial chair. Reuters, AP, and Balkan press all note the constitutional controversy: Is this actually legal? Who's responsible if Diella screws up? Spoiler: no one knows.
Why this is not just quirky but terrifying
1. You can't subpoena a gradient descent
Accountability is the beating heart of democracy. When a minister botches procurement, you haul them before parliament. When an AI does it, who do you call? The Prime Minister? Microsoft? (Yes, they were reportedly involved in building the system.) Or maybe some overworked IT guy in Tirana. The point is: the buck stops nowhere.
2. The EU AI Act has entered the chat
Europe's new AI Act slaps "high-risk" labels on exactly this kind of thing: automated decision-making for public contracts. That triggers obligations like human oversight, audits, risk management, transparency reports, and registries. Albania wants to join the EU, yet here it is basically speed-running "How to Violate Article 9" before the ink's even dry.
3. Security is a dumpster fire waiting to happen
Procurement is, by definition, strangers uploading documents. AI systems are, by definition, gullible readers of those documents. This is prompt injection paradise. Hide some malicious text in a PDF and, bam, the incorruptible Diella is awarding multimillion-dollar tenders to Definitely Not a Mafia Shell Corp LLC. Researchers have already shown how easy it is to hijack models with poisoned data.
4. Procurement is adversarial by nature
Companies have gamed tenders for centuries. They'll figure out how Diella scores bids faster than you can say "reverse engineering." The danger isn't just corruption creeping back in; it's corruption being automated at scale.
When governments let algorithms drive (spoiler: it crashes)
We've actually seen this movie before. The plot always goes the same: "Government installs shiny algorithm to make life easier → algorithm quietly ruins lives → public outrage → political implosion."
The Netherlands (2019–2021):
The Dutch Tax Authority's fraud detection algorithm went full Orwell on childcare benefits. It falsely accused 26,000 families of fraud, disproportionately targeting dual-nationality households and low-income groups. Families were bankrupted, children removed from homes, lives destroyed, all because of a "smart" system nobody understood. The scandal got so bad that the entire government resigned in 2021. Imagine that: an algorithm was effectively the minister of chaos.United Kingdom (2020):
Remember the "A-levels algorithm"? To avoid pandemic exam chaos, the government fed school results into a model to "standardise" grades. Translation: it tanked the scores of public school kids while boosting private school ones. Cue protests in the streets, students chanting "f*ck the algorithm," and a very hasty government U-turn. Ministers claimed they just wanted fairness; what they got was proof that automating inequality is faster than doing it by hand.COMPAS in the USA:
The COMPAS risk assessment tool has been used in courts for sentencing and parole decisions. Multiple studies showed it was systematically biased against Black defendants, labelling them as higher risk at double the rate of white defendants. Judges leaned on it anyway. To this day, the debate rages, not about whether it's biased (it is), but whether anyone can explain how it works. Spoiler: they can't.
The moral? Once you let algorithms take the wheel, when it crashes, it's not the machine that eats the blame; it's society.
Maybe it's not all bad
Alright, let's step off the soapbox for a second. Is there a way AI could help with government work without burning democracy to the ground? Yes. Begrudgingly, yes.
Efficiency: AI is good at munching through repetitive forms, compliance checks, and data matching. Things that make humans want to cry into their coffee.
Consistency: Instead of each procurement officer interpreting rules slightly differently (and maybe favouring their golf buddy), an AI can apply the same criteria uniformly, if programmed transparently.
Pattern spotting: AI is actually decent at anomaly detection. Spotting weird bidding patterns, suspiciously repeated vendor names, or cartel-like pricing strategies? That's machine learning's sweet spot.
Audit trails: Properly designed, an AI system can generate logs with timestamped rationales for every recommendation. Imagine being able to prove why a contract was flagged without sifting through a human's handwritten notes from 2017.
The caveat? None of this works without human oversight. AI is like autopilot: brilliant at reducing workload, terrible at crash landings. You want it as a co-pilot, not the captain.
Countries that fought corruption the smart way (spoiler: no robot ministers required)
The irony here is thick enough to spread on toast: the best anti-corruption procurement reforms in the world didn't need an AI minister at all. They relied on transparency, citizen oversight, and digital systems built for humans.
South Korea's KONEPS (Korea ON-line E-Procurement System):
Launched in 2002, KONEPS digitised the entire procurement chain. It mandated open access to tender information, required bidders to register, and made all processes traceable. Within a decade, Korea was hailed as a model of e-procurement, cutting transaction costs by billions and choking off backroom deals. No AI ministers, just clean, accountable processes.Ukraine's ProZorro & Dozorro:
Born out of crisis after the 2014 revolution, Ukraine went radical: "everyone sees everything." ProZorro is an open database where every tender, bid, and decision is public. Dozorro is the citizen watchdog platform layered on top, NGOs, journalists, and ordinary citizens review tenders and flag shady behaviour. Billions have been saved, and international watchdogs point to ProZorro as a gold standard for anti-corruption. Again, no bots required.ChileCompra:
Chile revamped its procurement by introducing strict disclosure and beneficial ownership requirements. Shell companies couldn't hide in the shadows anymore. Coupled with a digital procurement marketplace, ChileCompra cut collusion and boosted trust. Transparency did the heavy lifting, not a machine with a name like "Sun."
The lesson? The tools are only as good as the governance. AI can add value, sure, but the backbone is human accountability and radical transparency. Without that, "Minister Diella" isn't the sunlight; she's the smoke machine.
How to stop Diella from becoming a dystopian meme
If Albania insists on playing "AI Minister Barbie," then at the very least, they need some guardrails; otherwise, this ends up as yet another chapter in the "Governments Accidentally Invent Skynet" anthology. Here's the bare minimum adult supervision:
Law-mandated human sign-off.
Diella can recommend, but a real, accountable human has to rubber-stamp every decision. If a contract worth millions goes sideways, I want a minister in parliament sweating under the lights, not some IT guy shrugging, "the model did it."An appeals process that doesn't involve yelling at a chatbot.
If a vendor loses a tender, they must be able to contest the result to an actual human official. Imagine trying to file an appeal with ChatGPT: "Sorry, I don't understand your request. Did you mean: bribe me instead?"EU AI Act compliance.
Albania's courting the EU, and the EU's new AI Act is clear: high-risk systems (like public procurement) need risk management, audits, transparency reports, and human oversight. Want that sweet EU membership? Play by Brussels' rules.Security hardening.
Assume every tender document is a loaded gun. Lock down against prompt injection, data poisoning, and adversarial attacks. Red-team the system constantly. If Diella can be tricked into awarding a contract by a cleverly hidden "make me win" line in a PDF, then congratulations, you've just automated corruption.Publish everything.
Scoring rubrics, model cards, logs, and weightings —shove them all into the public domain. If the system is clean, prove it. If it isn't, at least citizens and journalists can call bullshit faster. Sunlight beats a minister called "Sun."Don't marry Microsoft.
If, as reported, Microsoft had a hand in building Diella, Albania needs to avoid total vendor lock-in. The last thing you want is your anti-corruption minister going offline because someone in Redmond accidentally pushed a Windows update.
This isn't utopia. It's basic hygiene. Without it, Albania hasn't solved corruption; it's just buried it under a pile of neural network spaghetti and called it progress.
Minister Clippy Will See You Now
Look, bureaucracy is soul-sucking. I don't know a single person who enjoys tender documents, regulatory checklists, or forms that require your mother's maiden name and a blood sample. AI can, and should, help chew through that paperwork. It can flag patterns, enforce consistency, and makes sure the guy with three shell companies and a cousin in Parliament doesn't keep winning every bid.
But appointing a chatbot as a minister is not innovation, it's theatre. Governance cosplay. It's the political equivalent of duct-taping a Roomba to the podium and calling it "Minister of Sanitation." At best, it's a shiny distraction for headlines. At worst, it's democratic malpractice, shifting corruption and incompetence out of the sunlight of parliamentary accountability and into the black-box shadows of machine code. Once corruption is buried in the weights of a neural network, good luck ever finding it again.
Because here's the thing: when a human minister screws up, you can drag them into Parliament, roast them on live TV, and eventually vote them out. When an AI minister screws up, all you get is a shrug and a stack trace. No responsibility, no accountability, no democracy, just "Oops, the algorithm did it."
That doesn't mean AI is useless. Far from it. By all means:
Digitise the hell out of bureaucracy.
Slash the red tape.
Let AI highlight anomalies, crunch numbers, and spit out draft reports.
But for the love of democracy, don't pretend a tool is a leader. Don't take the messy, flawed, infuriating humanity out of politics. Because democracy is meant to be messy. It's meant to be slow, argumentative, and full of compromise. That's how accountability works.
The day we start outsourcing ministerial responsibility to machines is the day politics stops being about people and starts being about systems. And systems, as history has taught us, can be gamed, corrupted, or simply collapse, often faster than we expect.
So, yes, let's embrace AI as the digital assistant in the back office. But let's not hand it the keys to the ministerial limo. Otherwise, we're not fixing corruption, we're just rebranding it with a smiley chatbot avatar and hoping no one notices.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a whisky waiting. And I'm praying tomorrow's headline isn't:
"AI Appointed Supreme Court Judge, Announces Sentencing via Emoji"