Why Legislative Modernizers Need to Pay Attention to this New Wave of AI

Written By Beatriz Rey

What Claude, Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and agentic AI mean for the future of lawmaking

BY BEATRIZ REY

In late 2025, something important happened in the AI world. A new generation of tools was released, and together they mark a real step-change in what these systems can do.

These are not just better chatbots. They are systems designed for reasoning, planning, and executing complex tasks, exactly the kinds of things legislatures struggle with every day. So let me walk you through what each of these tools does and why people working on legislative development should care.

Claude Opus 4.5

Let me start with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5, because it is the “brain” behind a lot of what comes next.

At its core, Claude Opus 4.5 is a large language model built for deep reasoning, complex problem-solving, and multi-step tasks. That means it is especially good at situations where you have to hold a lot of information in mind, compare options, detect contradictions, and work through several layers of logic (not just produce a quick answer).

Now think about how legislatures actually work. Drafting a bill, revising amendments, reconciling two versions of a text, or checking whether a new proposal conflicts with existing law are all reasoning-heavy tasks. This is exactly where a model like Claude Opus 4.5 becomes useful.

In practice, this kind of AI could help a legislative research office quickly synthesize thousands of pages of law, case law, and committee reports. It could flag inconsistencies inside a draft bill, or identify when two amendments contradict each other. It could even support committees by pre-screening long reports and highlighting what really changed.

Claude Code

Now let me turn to Claude Code, also by Anthropic, which is where things become operational.

Claude Code is not just a model; it is an AI-powered coding environment. You tell it what you want in natural language; for example, “build me a dashboard that tracks all amendments to this bill” and it writes the actual software. It can explore existing code, modify it, and run multi-step development tasks on its own.

Why does this matter for parliaments? Because modern legislatures run on software: bill tracking systems, committee management platforms, budget tools, transparency portals, and internal workflows. These systems are usually expensive, slow to change, and heavily dependent on outside vendors.

Claude Code changes that dynamic. It allows legislative IT teams (and even non-programmers working with them) to prototype and build tools simply by describing what they need. Instead of waiting months for a contractor to update a system, a parliamentary office could generate new features, automate internal workflows, or fix bugs much faster.

You can also imagine “legislative bots” built with this technology: tools that automatically sort incoming documents, notify staff when deadlines approach, or update tracking systems when something moves in committee. This is not futuristic — it is now technically feasible.

Google Gemini 3 Pro

Finally, let me introduce Gemini 3 Pro, which adds another crucial dimension: multimodal intelligence at scale.

Gemini 3 Pro is designed to work not just with text, but also with PDFs, tables, images, audio, video, and massive datasets all at once. Its large context window means it can ingest entire legal codes, multi-year budget datasets, or long sequences of committee transcripts in a single task.

For legislatures, this is incredibly powerful. Parliamentary work is inherently multi-modal: you have draft bills, fiscal notes, hearing videos, written testimony, and statistical reports that all need to be interpreted together.

With Gemini 3 Pro, a research service could, for example, take a budget proposal, the transcripts of the hearings about it, and the underlying data, and ask the AI to produce a coherent analytical summary. It could track how a policy evolved across multiple legislative sessions, or identify patterns across years of lawmaking.

What does all of this mean for legislative modernizers?

What I want to emphasize is that these tools are not just incremental improvements. They signal a shift toward AI systems that can reason, plan, and execute real institutional work.

For legislatures, that opens four big doors.

First, it allows us to rethink legislative analytics. AI can handle large-scale legal and policy research, giving members and staff better evidence and deeper insight.

Second, it enables real automation of routine work — drafting technical sections, classifying documents, tracking changes — freeing people to focus on political judgment and deliberation.

Third, it creates new possibilities for transparency and public engagement, because information can be synthesized and explained much more clearly to citizens.

And finally, it lowers the barrier to building and maintaining digital systems inside parliaments, reducing dependence on vendors and making institutions more agile.

That is why legislative modernizers need to be paying close attention to what just happened in AI. The tools now exist to do things that, until very recently, were simply not possible inside legislative institutions.

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Modern Parliament (“ModParl”) is a newsletter from POPVOX Foundation that provides insights into the evolution of legislative institutions worldwide. Learn more and subscribe at modparl.substack.com.

Beatriz Rey
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