“I’m not here to replace humans,” says a woman wearing traditional Albanian clothing, a light-colored headscarf, and an embroidered robe. She stands before the flags of Albania and the European Union and adds, “Some have labeled me unconstitutional because I am not human. This hurts me.”
The speaker is Minister Diella, an artificial intelligence system that delivered a three-minute video speech during its introduction to Albania’s parliament. In September 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama appointed Diella as Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, making it the world’s first AI to hold a cabinet-level position.
Diella, whose name means “sun” in Albanian, was developed by the National Agency for Information Society in partnership with Microsoft, using large language models from OpenAI. The AI is visually represented as a woman from the Zadrima region, portrayed by Albanian actress Anila Bisha.
Rama said Diella will oversee public procurement to ensure that tenders are “100% free of corruption” and fully transparent. Government contracting has long been a source of corruption in Albania, a country seeking membership in the European Union.
Diella was initially launched in January 2025 as a virtual assistant on the e-Albania platform, helping citizens access government services and documents. By midyear, the system had processed nearly one million digital interactions, paving the way for its promotion to the cabinet. Prime Minister Edi Rama described the appointment as part of a broader modernization effort to improve efficiency and transparency as Albania advances toward European Union membership by 2030.
The appointment has sparked controversy, with opposition lawmakers calling it unconstitutional and warning of potential manipulation and lack of oversight. During the parliamentary session, they banged on their desks and boycotted the Cabinet vote, though it still passed with 82 votes in favor. Addressing critics directly, Diella said, “The Constitution speaks of institutions at the people’s service. It doesn’t speak of chromosomes, of flesh or blood.”
For the rest of the world, Albania’s appointment of Minister Diella marks a concerning step toward globalization and mass restriction of individual freedoms, as AI systems, programmed with liberal and globalist biases, begin assuming positions of political authority.
According to Albanian media, the Diella project is closely tied to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has showcased “Diella 2.0” and an upcoming “3.0” version as part of its digital governance portfolio, funded in part by international donors. Tony Blair has advised Prime Minister Edi Rama since 2013, when Rama’s center-left coalition first came to power. Rama’s political platform was modeled after Blair’s “New Labour” and “Third Way” politics.
The Tony Blair Institute currently partners with around 20 countries, mostly in Africa, on public sector reform and digital transformation projects. Critics in Albania argue that this collaboration effectively outsources key state functions to a foreign private organization. They warn that Albania is being used as a testing ground for Blair’s global initiatives, with Rama accused of trading national sovereignty for international approval.
Together with Microsoft’s involvement through Diella’s development, many see this convergence of global actors, Bill Gates, Tony Blair, and their organizations, as evidence that Albania’s AI experiment serves broader globalist ambitions rather than national reform.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been a key financial supporter of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, funding projects primarily focused on health and governance in Africa. Development tracking databases list multiple Gates Foundation grants to the institute.
The Tony Blair Institute promotes itself as a leader in using artificial intelligence and technology to modernize governance. Its flagship concept, the “Reimagined State,” envisions AI-driven systems transforming public service delivery and administrative efficiency. The institute also advocates strongly for net zero policies, calling them “inevitable” and central to 21st-century governance. Consequently, it is likely that AI ministers developed in association with the Tony Blair Institute would also regard net zero as both desirable and inevitable.
Both Tony Blair and Bill Gates have been outspoken proponents of digital identification systems. Blair has repeatedly argued that digital IDs will soon become standard for citizens in developed countries, stating in January 2025 that every British person will have a “unique digital identifier” used for government and commercial transactions. He has said such systems would reduce benefit and online fraud while integrating facial recognition and DNA data to improve law enforcement.
Gates made similar remarks in a 2020 Reddit AMA, saying that digital certificates could verify vaccination or recovery status during health crises. His comments aligned with the mission of ID2020, an initiative backed by Microsoft, the United Nations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which promotes digital ID programs in developing nations.
Both Blair and Gates have also advocated for increased online regulation and censorship. Gates has called for artificial intelligence to identify and remove “vaccine misinformation” in real time, arguing that delayed moderation allows harmful content to spread. Facebook, Google, and Pinterest enlisted fact-check partners like PolitiFact, which has a left-leaning, pro-establishment bias and was originally funded by a Gates Foundation grant, to enforce these standards.
In September 2024, Blaire urged world leaders to reach an international agreement on social media controls, warning that unregulated online information is “messing with [young people’s] minds in a big way.” His institute later submitted evidence to the UK Parliament recommending policies to “slow the spread of misinformation,” “enforce against the most dangerous and deliberate falsehoods,” and apply “counter-extremism methodology” to online narratives.
A separate report from the Tony Blair Institute went further, recommending that governments designate certain “hard-right” organizations as hate groups, thereby restricting their access to media platforms and public institutions. Those recommendations will likely be built into Albania’s newest minister and similar AI ministers when they are rolled out in Africa and around the world.