Congress Cannot Delegate the Word “Shall”

Congressional staffers in Washington are reportedly using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok for research, summaries and help with legislative text. One failure became public when the office of Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, copied stray Claude output into the record of the National Defense Authorization Act, leaving prompt residue and a chatbot response marker inside the document.

That mistake does not mean a chatbot enacted a law. Congress still assigns authority through sponsors, committees, votes and presidential action. But generated language can enter the documents that move through those stages, and a machine does not need a vote to introduce a bad definition, a false citation or an exception broader than its operator intended.

The distinction between assistance and delegation therefore depends on review, not branding. A model may offer ten fluent versions of a provision in seconds. Fluency does not establish that any version matches existing law, fits the policy instruction or survives an adversarial reading by an agency, judge or regulated party.

A defensible chain begins with a staff member who can identify the source of a claim. Legislative counsel must test the language against the code. Committee staff must reconcile amendments and negotiated changes. Version-control systems must show which person inserted, accepted or removed each clause. The lawmaker whose name appears on the bill remains responsible for the result.

Each handoff is ordinary congressional labor, which is precisely why the sales pitch about speed can conceal it. Faster first drafts may help an overloaded office. They can also create more text to verify while encouraging supervisors to mistake a polished paragraph for completed work. The model saves minutes at the front and can spend lawyers’ hours at the back.

Congress could make the mechanism inspectable without banning every use. Offices could retain prompts and outputs connected to legislative drafting, label generated passages in internal version histories, prohibit confidential material from entering unapproved systems and require a named human reviewer before text reaches a committee record. Existing ethics and security offices could publish common rules instead of leaving each aide to improvise.

The next test is procedural: whether House and Senate offices disclose which tools touch bills, who audits their output and what happens when generated text reaches the public record unchecked. Congress may delegate typing. It cannot delegate what “shall” requires of everyone else.