A Startup for Statecraft
Launching Lawgiver AI
I’m excited to announce the release of our MVP for LawgiverAI. You’ve been hearing from me about it for months, and finally, it’s here.
The journey is just beginning. For the last 5 months I’ve worked harder, learned and grown more, than any job or previous creative endeavor has demanded. They say startups are hard, but words do not do the difficulty justice.
Allow me, then, a moment of celebration, and forgive the shameless self-promotion—it is not without cause. You see, you signed up for Hacking State and Lawgiver is a startup for statecraft. Let me explain:
Modern legislation is intractable. The collection of resolutions, amendments, bills, laws, and regulations that make up The U.S. Federal Statutes at Large is so vast and layered that its precise size is unknown. In addition to the sheer volume of legislation in play, these documents are written in legalese that is difficult to understand. Conventions and language vary across time, both between and within legislative bodies. All of these factors render law opaque. Making sense of a given area of public policy often requires not only familiarity with terms of art, but also subject matter expertise, and time spent searching and sorting through bills.
I believe human labor would be better spent crafting better policy, rather than painstakingly hunting for relevant materials. Moreover, it is difficult to make good policy without a 10,000 ft. view of what’s actually going on.
Lawgiver is a technology play aimed at the heart of governance. It exists to put tools in the hands of policy professionals, policymakers, and the public that will render legislation legible. The idea is simple: if Seeing Like a State works for states, it should work for you, too!
Lawgiver is right now an AI-native legislation tracker and research tool for policy professionals. In the first phase, we’re using large language models to give our users a handle on legislation by making it searchable, chat-able, and connected semantically. There are yields on the ground floor of taking the mass of unstructured data that is our legal code, and simply producing graspable structure. Out of chaos, order.
Check out the new demo
We have a number of upcoming tools and tricks up our sleeves to forward the goal of making legislation legible, including:
Policy Maps
Legislative Agents
Github for legislation
Law as code
and
A Machine Congress
Each of these will be fleshed out and articulated further in Lawgiver’s native documentation and copy. For now, if you are interested in being an early beta tester or just receiving product updates, please sign up for the Lawgiver mailing list.
I am looking for (in order of importance):
Early users/potential customers
Investors
Friendly, but critical, product feedback
Shares/spreading the word
This will be the last Lawgiver-focused post for some time, as we will be returning to our regular scheduled programming. Thank you for reading this far, and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or interest in being involved with Lawgiver.
I’m speaking at Urbit Subassembly at the foothills of Mt. Ranier next week. I’ll be giving a revised and updated talk on The Zero Knowledge Society.
I hope you all enjoyed last week’s interview with Ben McCormick on Kinode, another decentralized operating system.
There are more interviews coming, and I promise once the startup has legs, more writing, too!
Best,
Alex