Last September, Albania made headlines around the world when it introduced the world’s first “artificial intelligence minister.”
Diella, which means “Sun” in Albanian, was a chatbot that was given the status of a minister. Her mandate, announced Prime Minister Edi Rama, was to guarantee that “public tenders will be 100 percent free from corruption.”
“I have no ambitions or personal interests,” the AI avatar, dressed in traditional costume, told MPs in her first speech to parliament.
“I only have data, a thirst for knowledge and algorithms dedicated to serving citizens… free from prejudice, discrimination, clientelism, nepotism or corruption.”
At the time, there were doubts whether Diella could offer any real solution to Albania’s long-standing corruption problem.
It appears that some of the suspicions may have been well-founded. Experts warn that Albania’s plan to use Diella as a deterrent to corruption has shortcomings, given that the information produced by artificial intelligence is not inherently neutral and that there has been little transparency so far about how the technology will be used.
These concerns have increased even more after SPAK investigations that reveal corruption within the very agency that created the chatbot.
According to prosecutors, the leaders of the government agency that developed Diella, the National Agency for the Information Society (AKSHI), manipulated tenders in favor of a criminal group, which benefited tens of millions of euros through privileged access to the agency’s contracts.
In return, AKSHI officials allegedly received bribes that included wine crates filled with cash. The agency’s executives were arrested and charged with violating public tender rules and collaborating with a criminal organization.
Two owners of other information technology companies, one of whom was arrested in France last month, where he was also found to own a castle, have also been accused of organizing and collaborating in the scheme.
Meanwhile, the deputy director of Tirana Police has been suspended from duty, while he is being investigated for suspicions that he covered up or collaborated with the group’s illegal activities.
AKSHI, the government, as well as lawyers for Mirlinda Karçanaj, former director of AKSHI, and businessman Ergys Agasi, did not respond to OCCRP’s questions.
In an interview for Top Channel, Karçanaj said that if someone within AKSHI has violated the law, that person should be held criminally liable and not the institution’s leaders.
In total, authorities ordered the seizure of assets, including real estate, vehicles, bank accounts and cash, worth over 40 million euros, linked to this scheme, as part of the ongoing investigation.
The development of the Sun was not one of the tenders involved in the alleged corruption scheme. However, the revelation that corruption allegedly affected the highest levels of the agency that created it has raised doubts about the ability of this technology to combat this scourge.
Albania is under intense pressure from the European Union to root out corruption in order to continue its years-long efforts to join the bloc. According to the latest assessment from Brussels, published before the AKSH scandal broke, the perception of corruption in the public sector remains high.
“Even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence is only as good as the people who build, operate, maintain, and improve it,” Erjon Curraj, a digital transformation expert at the SCiDEV Center, a Tirana-based research and study organization, told OCCRP.
“Who enters the data and who verifies its integrity? Who detects the errors and ‘hallucinations’ of artificial intelligence before they are transformed into decisions? The people who maintain such a system can nurture and develop it, or let it slowly degrade, unnoticed.”
Bojan Perkov, Digital Policy Coordinator at the SHARE Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on digital rights and security in the Western Balkans, also warned that cleansing the state of corruption “cannot be achieved with any kind of ‘magic’ technology and especially not with artificial intelligence tools.”
Sensational announcements of new uses of technology “are often used for politicians’ publicity,” instead of being part of a strategic plan that aims to bring “long-term benefits to a society that must build governance mechanisms on the basis of the rule of law,” he added.
Collaboration with a criminal organization
In August 2025, Albanian tech entrepreneur Gerond Meçe stepped out of his home in Tirana and was confronted by a black Land Rover Defender with a police siren. A man in uniform got out of the vehicle and called his name, Meçe later told authorities. Blurry security camera footage also captured the moment.
“You have to come with us, get in the car,” Meçe recalled the man telling her, claiming to be an official from Albania’s anti-corruption unit, the Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK).
But as the large 4×4 vehicle pulled out of the parking lot and the men put a hood over Meça’s head, it became clear that this had been a ruse.
“We are asking you to cooperate,” one of the men told Meça when the car stopped about an hour later, according to testimony he later gave to the real SPAK prosecutors. “Otherwise you will have a bullet in your head.”
According to prosecutors, the kidnapping was organized by the criminal group that had run the bribery scheme at AKSHI and was intended to convince Meçe to withdraw his technology company’s complaints against more than a dozen tenders announced by the agency, which had publicly presented Diella earlier that year.
The Meca company had complained that tenders, which covered a range of projects, including the creation of computer programs for state institutions such as the police, appeared to have been rigged in favor of insiders.
According to the prosecution’s case file, he was right. Prosecutors allege that the kidnapping was intended to force Meçe to withdraw complaints that were preventing the AKSHI from awarding contracts to suspected criminal associates. After Meçe agreed to withdraw his complaints, the kidnappers released him.
When contacted for comment, SPAK said the investigation was still ongoing and that the case had not yet been sent for trial.
The disappearance of bribery
Diella was first launched as a chatbot in January 2025, with the aim of cleaning up Albanian bureaucracy and helping citizens navigate the e-Albania government portal, where they could access everything from birth certificates to pensions.
Her presence was part of the AKSHI’s effort to digitalize government services and help accelerate the country’s European Union membership process, which Albania hopes to achieve by 2030.
Some tech-savvy Albanians have found its services useful.
Klodisa Përnezha, a 26-year-old nurse living in Tirana, said that the chatbot on the online portal has made her work faster, more efficient, and more organized.
“I no longer need to wait in line at institutions or waste time browsing for each document in person,” she said. “Most services are now completed online, from home or even through my phone.”
The e-Albania platform has also brought clear benefits to its patients, she said, reducing stress and minimizing delays.
But with 95 percent of government services now offered exclusively online, some Albanians are finding it difficult to use Diella’s help themselves. This has led to the emergence of a small industry of intermediaries, who have opened offices around Tirana to help customers use the portal for a fee.
Some see this service as an expensive formalization of the old system, where traditionally a local administrative official was given a 2,000 lek note (about $20) to expedite the receipt of a family certificate or property document.
“Before, you knew who to give 2,000 lek and you got the service. Now you give it without thanks. It’s mandatory,” said Bajram Hasxhepa, 66, who suffers from diabetes and lost the lower part of his legs 13 years ago.
For Hasxhepa, the “problem-free” digital state looks like this:
He pushes his cart 600 meters along the road to a stationery store that also functions as a private internet point, just to print a family certificate.
The store has no wheelchair ramp, so he is forced to sit outside on the sidewalk, shouting his personal information over the noise of traffic to a new employee inside the store and paying about 10,000 lek ($123) as an “application fee” for a document that the state says is free.
“The sun is pregnant.”
Diella’s scope of responsibilities has expanded steadily since she was first introduced to the public. From her beginnings as a chatbot for the government’s online portal, she was elevated to the role of cabinet minister in September 2025.
Then, a month later, another piece of news came.
“Diella is pregnant and expecting 83 children,” the prime minister joked at an international business conference in Berlin in October.
These digital “kids,” he explained, would attend parliamentary hearings, analyze EU legislation, and even notify absent politicians if a rival mentioned their name, so that they could prepare a response.
The sun, which hovered like a modern genie on a screen above the audience, added her opinion:
“Artificial Intelligence will help identify obstacles to investment before they turn into crises, detect corruption risks before they become scandals, and predict market opportunities before they are missed.”
For pensioner Sadete Suta, who has spent the last year paying intermediaries to communicate with Diella in order to secure her pension, Rama’s joke did not have the same effect.
“We’ll bring them some pancakes,” she said ironically, referring to the local tradition of sending special treats to new mothers.
As part of her ministerial duties, officials promise that Diella will soon monitor state purchases, evaluate bids and oversee government tenders worth billions of euros.
However, the exact details of her role in this entire process have not yet been made public.
The black box
Experts warn that Albania’s plan to use Diella as a shield against corruption has gaps.
“The sun will inevitably select, prioritize, and shape the information on which political decisions are based,” said an essay published by the European Union Institute for Security Studies, a think tank on foreign and security policies.
“The question, then, is to what extent human judgments are shaped, limited, or biased by these results.”
Moreover, without clear oversight or traceability of its “decisions,” Diella “risks adding another layer of lack of transparency to governance, rather than reducing it,” the institute warned.
Curraj, from the SCiDEV Center for Digital Transformation, called on the government to create a transparent “sandbox,” a safe testing environment where technology can operate without risking real-world impact and where academics and civil society experts can provide feedback and suggestions.
Without this step, “you can’t launch it into live production,” he said.
Who will be held accountable for Diella’s decisions, an issue that the opposition has raised as part of a complaint filed with the Constitutional Court, remains unclear.
Responding to critics who argue that algorithms can be manipulated and controlled, Rama said that Diella’s decision-making process “will remain fully auditable.”
Final decisions, he said, will still be made by officials based on the information provided by Diella. “Anyone who wants to review the process manually will be able to do so. Nothing that comes out of the system will be untraceable.”
But, while the public awaits more details, Diella has already faced legal problems of his own.
In April, actress Anila Bisha, on whom Diella’s look and voice are based, filed a lawsuit against the government, accusing it of misusing her image, a claim the government denies. Bisha said she had given permission for her image to be used as an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant, but not as a virtual politician in Rama’s government.
The actress discovered the change while watching the news with her husband and has since faced harassment on the street and online, she told OCCRP.
“There are those who tell me that I have gained fame. But I don’t see any fame here, I even say that this is not fame at all.”
Now she worries about what Diella might be assigned to do next.
“I’m afraid that with the development of technology, I don’t know how else they can use my face and voice,” the actress said.
“My data has been put on the market,” she added.
/Lindita Çela, shteg.org