Albania’s AI 'minister' Diella 'pregnant' with 83 digital children

Tirana: In a political theatre moment that sounded more like satire than statecraft, Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama announced that Diella — the country's AI-generated "Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence" — is now "pregnant" and will "give birth" to 83 children.

The metaphor is deliberate. Those 'children will in fact be digital agents: one AI assistant assigned to each of the 83 Members of Parliament from the ruling Socialist Party. Rama unveiled the plan at the Global Dialogue event in Berlin, casting it as the next phase in an audacious attempt to embed AI directly into the machinery of governance.

NDTV, which first amplified the quote, reported the PM as saying the digital offspring will brief MPs on what they missed in the chamber and tell them "who you should counter-attack."

Diella herself is only weeks old as a minister. In September 2025 she was introduced - via a screen rather than a swearing-in - as the world's first AI given a cabinet-level portfolio. Reuters described the appointment as a radical wager: an algorithm placed in charge of the country's infamously murky public procurement process in a bid to remove human discretion from decisions worth billions.

AP News recorded the chaotic debut, with opposition MPs jeering as the virtual minister "addressed" parliament. Critics dismissed the move as a techno-theatrical distraction from systemic corruption. Supporters framed it as an EU-facing signal that Albania is ready to modernise its bureaucracy.

The 'pregnancy' announcement raises the stakes. By seeding 83 agents into the legislature itself, Rama is trying to turn AI from a back-office risk-tool into a structural actor in day-to-day politics. If the assistants really do summarise sessions, track rhetoric and propose counter-attacks, they will not just automate paperwork but shape how elected officials respond, argue and vote. That, in turn, drags governments into fresh legal and philosophical territory. Constitutions are written for humans. Accountability attaches to people, not models.

The Guardian, in its coverage of Diella's appointment, noted that shifting decisions from ministers to machines doesn't take the politics away; it simply pushes influence upstream into whoever curates the data, trains the weights or writes the guard-rails.

Rama's defenders insist there is method, not mania, here. They point out that Diella already handled around a million public-service interactions when she lived as a customer-service avatar on the e-Albania portal, and argue that moving such a system closer to the core of the state is a logical next step.

Skeptics counter that digitising a corrupt context risks encoding the same biases at machine speed. One Albanian commentator, quoted by local media during Diella's launch, offered a blunt prediction: "Even Diella will be corrupted in Albania." Whatever the truth, the symbolism has already done its work. The image of an AI minister "expecting" dozens of algorithmic offspring landed in global headlines from NDTV to Reuters to AP, sparking a wave of incredulous commentary. And beneath the spectacle lies a real stress-test of statecraft in the AI era: can a government make an algorithm not only help govern but govern visibly - and survive the legitimacy questions that follow?

Albania has made itself the first case study. Whether it becomes a template or a warning label will be decided not by the metaphor but by what the 83 "children" actually do once they enter the chamber.