AI Is an Intern. Keep the Pen.

Every policy shop is now using AI for the donkey work, as a good friend of mine calls it: docket checks, building decks, and reformatting the appendix.

The right way to think about these tools is as interns. They are great. They are eager. They want to be helpful. Depending on the model you choose, or choose to pay for, you get a first-year college intern, a second-year law student, or a PhD candidate. Some are better educated and more capable than others.

They are still interns, and you still check their work. For a small boutique shop, they are also the great equalizer. The big firms' advantage was always headcount: enough analysts to read everything, draft everything, and bill for it. Now a small shop has the same bench, and it moves faster.

The trouble starts with the creep. The intern who summarizes the hearing offers to draft the response. The one who drafts the response offers to decide the ask. Each step is small, helpful, and one step past a line nobody drew.

Draw the lines before the intern does. These hold up in a policy setting:

• A person decides. The tool lays out options; judgment is the job, and it has a name attached.
• A person talks to the member, the staffer, the regulator, and the reporter. Always.
• Nothing goes out under a name its owner has not read as if they wrote it.
• Confidential information stays in rooms the organization controls, not in a public chatbot.
• Keep the prompts. If AI helped shape a decision, the conversation is part of the record, and someone will eventually ask for it.

That last one stopped being hypothetical the week this was first posted. The top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees asked the President to preserve every prompt and answer that he, his staff, and his advisers submitted to AI chatbots, including Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude, in carrying out official duties. A White House official said the White House "preserves all required records in accordance with the law." Whatever you think of the request, the question underneath it belongs to everyone who uses these tools: where is the record, and who answers for the decision?

Let the interns do the donkey work. Keep the pen.