This Country Wants to Replace Its Corrupt Government With AI

With so much buzzy tech floating around these days, it's only natural for national governments to experiment as well.

For the past few years, the country of El Salvador's been experimenting with Bitcoin as legal tender, a woefully ineffective system that's had he opposite of its stated effects. In the United States, president Donald Trump is experimenting with a $500 billion AI infrastructure project, a massive campaign that's sat dormant for half a year.

And in Albania, which is home to 2.7 million people, the government is hoping that AI models like ChatGPT can take over for corrupt government ministers.

Per Politico, the Albanian prime minister Edi Rama suggested back in July that AI might be a handy tool in his efforts to stamp out government corruption and increase transparency.

"One day, we might even have a ministry run entirely by AI," he said at a press conference. "That way, there would be no nepotism or conflicts of interest."

Though most of this is theoretical posturing, Rama added that voters could hypothetically elect an AI algorithm to the council of ministers, turning Albania into "the first to have an entire government with AI ministers and a prime minister."

Ben Blushi, Albania's former minister of local government and decentralization, concurs. As Politico reported, Blushi argued that "societies will be better run by AI than by us because it won’t make mistakes, doesn’t need a salary, cannot be corrupted, and doesn’t stop working."

Among the Balkan nations, Albania is uniquely primed for some AI hype. It was an Albanian-American entrepreneur, Mira Murati, who helped transform OpenAI into the billion-dollar megacompany it is today, serving as CTO from 2018 to 2025. She recently split to form her own startup, the $2 billion Thinking Machines Lab.

Whether Murati's minor business celebrity will go far enough to fix Albania's corruption is difficult to say. Like many Balkan countries, Albania has had a difficult time recovering from the drastic and rapid transition from a centralized economy to a free market paradise.

Despite overwhelmingly voting to keep the long-ruling labor party in office in a 1991 election as its neighbors went up in flames, the Albanian government soon acquiesced to violent pro-Western demonstrations and started down the road to drastic reforms. These measures included a 15 percent flat corporate tax rate, a sell-off of public utilities to shadowy public-private partnerships, and a massive cut to welfare spending, creating opportunities for organized crime and corruption to flourish for over thirty years.

An AI government is unlikely to change this situation — but it probably couldn't make it much worse.

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