New AI tool makes the European Parliament’s history easier to access

Navigating the European Parliament’s history has just gotten easier with an artificial intelligence (AI) tool.

San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic announced on Monday a collaboration with the Parliament, which will use the company’s technology to make over two million official documents dating back to 1952 readily available to researchers, policymakers, educators, and the public.

The company said AI can increase efficiency in reducing the time to find and analyse relevant documents and offers an all-access window into Parliament archives, which includes legislation and parliamentary proceedings, resolutions, positions, and inter-institutional negotiations.

Parliament archives were previously only available in French, however, the tool allows the archives to be available in multiple European languages to serve all EU states. 

The tool called ‘Ask the EP Archives’, or Archibot, was built with Anthropic’s Claude large language model (LLM) in Amazon Bedrock, which allows customers to build and scale generative AI applications. 

“We decided to provide a way to navigate inside the huge document set. The arrival of generative AI is something that was a real shift,” said Ludovic Delepine, head of the archives unit, at the European Parliament.

“We wanted to make sure about one thing. If we use generative AI, we permanently need to be under control of the solution that we’ve built. We didn’t want to have any data that could be collected or extracted for other purposes,” he added. 

Anthropic bills itself as an AI safety research company and was founded by former OpenAI executives and researchers. Google and Amazon are major Anthropic investors.

“The innovative work from the team at the European Parliament showcases how AI can enhance democratic transparency,” Jack Clark, co-founder & Head of Policy at Anthropic, said in a statement. 

“By making vast archives instantly accessible to anyone, anywhere, Archibot sets a new standard for open governance that can inspire similar initiatives in other public institutions”.