Albania’s flagship “AI minister” Diella, created by the National Agency for the Information Society (AKSHI), is shadowed by a major corruption investigation into AKSHI officials accused of rigging public tenders and cooperating with a criminal group, while experts warn the chatbot cannot substitute for rule-of-law reforms as the EU presses Tirana on graft.
Albania’s government is facing intense scrutiny after anti-corruption prosecutors alleged that senior officials at AKSHI, the agency that built the country’s high-profile “AI minister” Diella, engaged in tender-rigging and collusion with a criminal network, prompting seizures of more than €40 million in assets and deepening doubts about the credibility of using artificial intelligence to fight corruption as the European Union maintains pressure on Tirana to clean up public procurement before advancing its accession bid.
The rise of Diella and the corruption allegations
Last September, Albania drew global attention when Prime Minister Edi Rama announced the promotion of Diella, a chatbot meaning “Sun” in Albanian, to ministerial status with a remit to ensure “public tenders will be 100 percent free of corruption”. In her maiden speech to parliament, the AI avatar, dressed in traditional costume, declared:
“I do not have personal ambitions or interests… I only have data, a thirst for knowledge, and algorithms dedicated to serving citizens… free from prejudice, discrimination, clientelism, nepotism, or corruption.”
However, according to reporting by Lindita Çela of shteg.org, published via the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), those assurances now sit alongside an explosive corruption case inside AKSHI, the very agency that developed Diella. Special prosecutors, in a court order issued by a judge, accuse AKSHI’s director and deputy director of violating public tender rules and “cooperating with a criminal organization”, alleging they received kickbacks that included wine boxes filled with cash. Two IT firm owners, one arrested last month in France where he also owns a castle, have been charged with organizing and collaborating in the scheme, while the deputy director of Tirana’s police force has been suspended over allegations of covering up or collaborating with the group’s illicit activities. Authorities have ordered seizures of real estate, vehicles, bank accounts and cash worth more than €40 million connected to the scheme, though none of the individuals have been indicted as the investigation remains ongoing.
AKSHI, the Albanian government, the Prime Minister’s office, and lawyers for the accused businessmen and officials did not respond to OCCRP’s questions, according to Çela’s reporting.
Kidnapping case linked to tender disputes
The investigation has also surfaced a dramatic kidnapping episode tied to the alleged tender-rigging. As reported by Lindita Çela of OCCRP, in the summer of August 2025, Albanian tech entrepreneur Gerond Meçe was confronted outside his Tirana home by men in a black Land Rover Defender with a police siren who claimed to be from the Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK). CCTV footage captured the moment before Meçe was hooded and driven away, where he was told:
“We’re asking you to cooperate… Otherwise you’ll have a bullet in your head.”
Prosecutors suspect the kidnapping was orchestrated by the criminal group allegedly running AKSHI’s kickback scheme, aimed at pressuring Meçe to withdraw his company’s appeals on more than a dozen tenders that his firm claimed were rigged in favour of insiders, a move that had stalled AKSHI’s contracting process with the alleged collaborators. After Meçe agreed to retract his appeals, the kidnappers released him. SPAK told OCCRP the investigation was ongoing and the case had not yet been sent to trial.
Digitisation drive and the emergence of middlemen
Diella was first launched by AKSHI as a chatbot in January 2025 to help citizens navigate the e-Albania government web portal, where they could access services ranging from birth certificates to pensions, as part of a broader digitisation push intended to speed Albania’s EU accession, which the country hopes to achieve by 2030. Some Albanians have found the portal helpful; Klodisa Përnezha, a 26-year-old nurse in Tirana, said it made her work “faster, more efficient, and better organized”, adding:
“I no longer need to wait in lines at institutions or waste time traveling in person for every document… Most services are now completed online, from home or even through my phone.”
Yet with 95 per cent of government services now exclusively online, others struggle to use Diella’s assistance independently, leading to a cottage industry of middlemen who charge fees to help clients navigate the portal. Bajram Hasxhepa, a 66-year-old diabetic who lost the lower part of his legs 13 years ago, described the new reality:
“Before, you knew whom to give the [cash] to, and you received the service. Now, you give it without thanks. It’s obligatory.”
Hasxhepa said he wheels himself 600 metres to an office supplies shop that doubles as a private internet booth to get a family certificate printed, paying a roughly $12 “application fee” for a document the state says is free, while sitting outside on the sidewalk because the shop has no wheelchair ramp.
‘Diella is pregnant’ and the expansion of AI governance
Diella’s remit has expanded steadily since her launch. After being elevated to cabinet minister in September 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama announced in October at an international business conference in Berlin that
“Diella is pregnant and she’s expecting 83 kids”, digital “
children” that would participate in parliamentary sessions, analyse EU legislation, and alert absent politicians if a rival mentions their name. Diella, projected above the audience, added:
“Artificial Intelligence will help identify investment barriers before they become crises, detect corruption risks before they become scandals, and predict market opportunities before they are missed.”
Officials have promised that, as part of her ministerial duties, Diella will soon monitor state purchases, evaluate bids, and oversee billions of euros in government tenders, though the exact details of her role have yet to be spelled out. For some citizens, such as retiree Sadete Suta, who has spent a year paying middlemen to interact with Diella to secure her pension, Rama’s quip did not land well:
“We’ll bring her some pancakes,”
she said sarcastically, referencing a local tradition for new mothers.
Expert warnings on AI, transparency and accountability
Experts caution that Albania’s plan to use Diella as a defence against corruption has significant flaws. As reported by Lindita Çela of OCCRP, Erjon Curraj, an expert in digital transformation at the Tirana-based SCiDEV Center, said:
“Even the most sophisticated AI is only as good as the humans who build, operate, maintain, and improve it… Who feeds the data, and who verifies its integrity? Who catches errors and hallucinations before they become decisions? The people who maintain such a system can nourish it or let it quietly degrade.”
Bojan Perkov, Digital Policy Coordinator of the SHARE Foundation, a non-profit focused on digital rights and security in the Western Balkans, warned that cleaning the state of corruption
“cannot be achieved with any kind of ‘magic’ technology, and especially not AI tools”,
adding that flashy announcements are “often used for politicians’ publicity” rather than forming part of a strategic plan to deliver
“long-term benefits for a society, which should build its governance mechanisms based on rule of law”.
An essay published by the European Union Institute for Security Studies, cited in OCCRP’s reporting, noted:
“Diella will inevitably sort, prioritise, and frame the information on which political decisions are based… The question is therefore to what extent human judgments are shaped, constrained, or biased by these outputs.”
The think-tank warned that without clear oversight or traceability of her “decisions”, Diella
“risks adding a further layer of opacity to governance rather than reducing it”.
Curraj urged the government to create a transparent “sandbox” — a secure testing environment where the technology could run safely without impacting the real world and where academics and civil society experts could offer feedback — saying:
“Without this step, ‘you cannot launch it in live production’.”
Legal challenges and questions of image rights
Diella has also run into legal trouble. In April, Anila Bisha, the actress on whose likeness and voice Diella is based, filed a lawsuit against the government, accusing it of misusing her image, which the government denies, according to OCCRP. Bisha said she gave permission for her image to be used as an AI-powered virtual assistant but not as a politician in Rama’s government, and she discovered the change while watching the news with her husband. Since then, she has faced harassment in the street and online, she told OCCRP, adding:
“There are those who tell me that I have gained fame. But I do not see any fame here, I even say this is not fame at all.”
Bisha expressed fear about future uses of her likeness:
“I have a fear that with the development technology has taken, I no longer know how else they might use my face and my voice… My data has been put on the market.”
EU accession pressure and the corruption backdrop
Albania remains under heavy pressure from the European Union to root out corruption as it pursues its years-long effort to join the bloc. According to OCCRP’s reporting, the latest assessment from Brussels, released before the AKSHI scandal broke, stated that perceptions of corruption in the public sector remain high. The opposition has raised accountability questions about Diella’s decisions as part of a complaint filed with the constitutional court.
Responding to critics who argue algorithms can be manipulated, Prime Minister Edi Rama said Diella’s decision-making “will remain fully auditable”, insisting final decisions will still be made by officials based on the information Diella provides:
“Anyone who wishes to review the process manually will be able to do so. Nothing that emerges from the system will be untraceable.”
