Introducing "Claude for Legislatures," A New Training Resource for Legislative Staff

As a team of prior Congressional staffers, we have spent the last handful of years researching how legislatures around the world can benefit from using emerging technologies to improve capacity, transparency, and effectiveness. We refer to this as combating the pacing problem. Since the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), we have monitored the progress of institutions as elected officials and staff have begun to adopt new tools and celebrated the establishment of guidance to foster safe and responsible use. We have also worked to support this innovation directly by designing training and resources specifically with legislative staff in mind to spread best practices and share insights.

To this collection of work, we are excited to share our latest resource: "Claude for Legislatures," a 101-style, on-demand training video designed specifically for legislative and parliamentary staff who want to explore how Anthropic's commercially available large language model (LLM) Claude can enhance their work.

Why This Training Matters

Over the last two years, we have seen how smart utilization of GenAI can assist Congressional staff in supporting Members of Congress and increase the effectiveness of serving constituents.

As the US Congress and other legislatures around the world establish guidance allowing for the use of commercially available LLMs, they should also consider providing training resources to ensure users are aware of best practices, appropriate use cases, and tips on how to get the best results from using these tools. To assist in filling that need until institutions are able to create customized training for their workforces, POPVOX Foundation has created a general training on how to use LLMs in a legislative or parliamentary context.

By designing our training around one model — in this case, Claude — our desire is to showcase how different AI models excel at different tasks, much like different instruments in a toolkit. But knowing a tool's strengths is only half the battle. The key to success with any LLM or GenAI chatbot lies in effective prompt creation. That is a skill that improves dramatically with training, practice, and guidance, regardless of which LLM a staffer chooses to use.

What The Training Covers

"Claude for Legislatures" covers:

• the fundamentals of understanding Anthropic’s Claude's capabilities in comparison with other LLMs,

• effective prompt creation techniques,

• best practices for using AI responsibly in legislative settings,

• practical use cases with real examples, such as:

  • bill analysis,

  • hearing preparation,

  • legislative strategy development, and

  • data visualization.

We also discuss details to consider around security, accuracy, and transparency, which are essential when integrating AI into government work.

A Resource for Everyone

Whether staff are completely new to AI or curious about Claude specifically, this training provides practical, actionable guidance that can be put to use immediately. It is designed to align with general best practices emerging from legislative guidance worldwide, though the audience is encouraged multiple times throughout the training to review and adhere to their specific institution’s guidelines and restrictions.

The goal is not to turn legislative staff into AI experts overnight, but rather to provide a solid foundation for safe, effective experimentation. This training also serves as a model of what future, institution-developed training modules can look like.

Empowering staff to safely experiment and develop comfort with AI tools today will better prepare them to understand, regulate, and leverage emerging technologies tomorrow.

Have questions or want to share successful use cases? Reach out to us at POPVOX Foundation.