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A single wording mistake cost the government millions. Now Estonia is using AI to spot legal errors before they become law—and to automate more of the state.

Estonia’s AI embarrassment began with a single wrong phrase.

In December, the Riigikogu, Estonia’s parliament, passed changes to the country’s Gambling Tax Act meant to lower the tax rate on remote gambling. But the wording of the law referred only to “skill games” for that year, not games of chance or remote gambling. Estonia’s entire gambling industry is worth around €300 million ($343 million), and its online gambling market is one of the fastest growing in the EU.

That single blunder meant online casinos were accidentally left outside the tax net for an entire year, losing the government €24 million ($27.4 million) a year in gambling revenues.

The error was spotted by a legal counsel for a gambling operator. But the embarrassment deepened when Luukas Ilves, former undersecretary for digital transformation, ran the legislation through Claude and Gemini. Both AI systems, Ilves said, immediately identified the inconsistency.

Within hours, Ilves had built a prototype tool—called Apsakaleidja, or “Fuckup Finder” —that could pull draft bills from the Riigikogu website and flag problems such as broken references, contradictory wording, arithmetic errors, and impossible dates. It categorizes the problems as high, medium, or low risk—of the 112 bills currently listed, 102 are rated high risk. One example highlighted on the Fuckup Finder suggests contradictory wording in draft text. Ilves even demo’d it on national TV , to the host’s amazement.

The blunder was embarrassing—but also triggered a revelation within the government. “The situation demonstrated that AI can be an incredibly useful assistant,” Kristen Michal, Estonia’s prime minister, told WIRED. “And—in the form of a vibe-coded platform to check draft legislation created in response to the incident—we saw an example of how agentic tools can empower civil society and individual citizens.”