Drafting by Prompt: Parliament Draws the Line on AI Lawmaking

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola has cautioned members of the European Parliament against relying on artificial intelligence systems to draft legislation. The assembly's administration is currently drawing up formal guidelines to govern how lawmakers and their teams may deploy artificial intelligence tools in their daily legislative work. The move aims to set boundaries around machine-generated text in parliamentary work, ensuring that elected representatives remain the actual authors of the rules that bind European citizens.

For decades, European Union legislation has carried a distinct, highly deliberate prose style: dense, painstakingly negotiated, and constructed phrase by phrase to balance the competing demands of twenty-seven nations and diverse political factions. The arrival of generative text models presents an obvious practical temptation for overworked political offices facing mountains of legislative files. When an algorithm is asked to draft a policy clause, however, it predicts the next most likely words rather than negotiating political trade-offs or understanding legal liability. If artificial intelligence systems draft amendments, the risk is that unvetted phrasing, technical errors, or automated hallucinations quietly make their way into binding statutory language without human scrutiny.

Writing laws in the European Parliament is fundamentally a human contest of compromise. In parliamentary committee rooms, single prepositions in draft amendments can take months to hammer out between rival political groups. The institutional resistance to automated drafting reflects a core reality of Brussels legislative machinery: words are not just content, but political currency. Delegating that drafting to software threatens the very friction upon which parliamentary consensus depends. The institution that recently spent years negotiating binding guardrails for external artificial intelligence developers is now confronting the slightly less glamorous task of telling its own members to put the chatbot down and write their own amendments.

Parliamentary authorities are finalising the internal guidelines outlining acceptable and prohibited uses of artificial intelligence tools for lawmakers and staff. Once presented, the guidance will establish the framework for parliamentary drafting, committee reports, and administrative tasks. Individual MEPs and political groups will then have to adapt their office workflows to ensure that statutory proposals reflect human oversight rather than automated convenience.