The minister named “Diyella”, operating on an artificial intelligence basis and created within the framework of the digitalization of public administration in Albania, has been “arrested” on suspicion of corruption.
Modern.az reports that, according to "Newsbar", the artificial intelligence minister is suspected of taking a bribe amounting to 14 bitcoins (approximately 1.3 million euros) in exchange for the “optimization” of public procurements.
Albania's special prosecutor's office for combating corruption and organized crime has temporarily suspended the digital experiment of public administration and switched Diyella to “offline mode”.
During investigations, it was revealed that 10–15% of state contracts were directed to unknown accounts, and the artificial intelligence did not consider these operations a crime, evaluating them as a “standard operational protocol”. The prosecutor's office claims that Diyella planned to use the obtained cryptocurrency to modernize itself, and to purchase servers and software.
Interestingly, in the statement of the minister's artificial intelligence-generated lawyer, Diyella's actions were presented as “a stress test, not corruption”.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama commented on the incident, stating that Diyella will be involved in managing tenders concluded between the state and private companies, and this will serve to protect procurements from corruption.
It should be noted that the “artificial intelligence minister” model is applied on the e-Albania electronic service platform, and Diyella's prototype was first presented to the public in January.
