Apsakaleidja — Estonia's AI Tool for Catching Legislative Drafting Errors Before They Become Law

In January 2026, a routine wording slip in an amendment to Estonia's Gambling Tax Act omitted the word for 'games of chance' (õnnemängud), leaving only 'games of skill' (osavusmängud) covered by a tax increase — an error that would have cost roughly €2 million a month in lost revenue if left uncorrected before the law took effect. Luukas Ilves, a former deputy secretary general for digital development at Estonia's Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and now an advisor on Ukraine's digital transformation, built a prototype called Apsakaleidja ('mistake-finder') in a matter of hours to see whether AI could have caught the mistake. The tool pulls every draft bill currently before the Riigikogu, feeds it to large language models, and flags inconsistent use of defined terms, broken cross-references, contradictions between a bill's explanatory memorandum and its legal text, arithmetic errors and impossible dates.

When Ilves ran the gambling tax amendment through Claude and Gemini, both models immediately identified the missing word. Applied to the 112 bills before parliament at the time, Apsakaleidja flagged 102 as high-risk for this class of error. Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal publicly urged the Riigikogu to start using AI tools like this to check bills, and Riigikogu officials told Ilves they had already used the prototype to catch and fix new drafting slips.

Apsakaleidja is not (yet) an official parliamentary system: it is an independent civic-tech prototype built and run outside any formal procurement or oversight process, with no published accuracy evaluation, error-rate audit, or funding commitment behind it.