In 528 AD, Emperor Justinian inherited a Roman legal system drowning in centuries of accumulated laws, conflicting edicts, and contradictory jurisprudence. His solution was radical: commission the Corpus Juris Civilis, a comprehensive codification and streamlining of Roman law across all provinces. Over 14 months, Justinian’s commission reduced approximately 3 million lines of legal text to just 150,000, laying the foundation for the Western legal canon.
America faces its own Justinian moment, but AI raises the stakes, creating a fork between two futures. One future, already emerging in China, is AI-driven totalitarianism. The other is an AI-powered republican renewal.
Between regulations, statutes, and case law, our country has accumulated around 260 million lines of law at the federal level alone. Agencies write rules to expand their authority and incumbents lobby for regulations that raise barriers to entry. While many politicians have tried with varied success to streamline modern law, the advent of AI changes the realm of possibility entirely.
AI is capable of writing new laws and is already deployed by some states and federal agencies to identify opportunities for regulatory streamlining. In this new governance frontier, large language models are shaping American policy. Just recently, we learned that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which thus far has focused on government spending — is now using AI to propose regulatory reductions.
AI-driven reform is exciting because republics die from institutional sclerosis. Plato and Cicero both observed this in their respective Republics. Indeed, Rome’s Senate accumulated powers and procedures until effective governance became impossible, beckoning an emperor. The French Directory multiplied bureaucracies until Napoleon seemed the only solution. The Weimar Republic’s financial and regulatory morass made strongman rule attractive.
Modern America exhibits its own early symptoms of regulatory morass and accompanying decay. Since 1980, regulatory accumulation has cost our economy $4 trillion in forgone annual GDP growth. The Code of Federal Regulations spans 185,984 pages containing over 1 million restrictions. Small manufacturers pay $50,100 per employee in compliance costs versus $24,800 for large corporations.
Just like in our predecessor republics, each law and regulation began with good intentions — protecting workers, ensuring safety, preventing fraud. But institutions and policies designed to solve old problems often outlive their goals and yield new, compounding problems. Nobel laureate economist George Stigler contended: “Regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit.”
China offers one answer to bureaucratic paralysis and capture: algorithmic authoritarianism. Their social credit system tracks citizens across every domain — financial transactions, social media, personal associations. Algorithms automatically restrict travel, education, and employment. China achieves what no human bureaucracy could: real-time monitoring and control of 1.4 billion people.
An unlikely alliance
In America, an unlikely alliance offers a different path. Progressive economists like Ezra Klein champion abundance while conservative governors slash regulations. As left-leaning Matt Yglesias promotes red-tape reduction to promote homebuilding, President Trump endeavors to eliminate federal bureaucracy. This ideological convergence reflects the recognition that artificial scarcity driven by regulation helps no one except the rent-seekers described by Stigler.
AI offers the first realistic tool to efficiently disrupt, capture and cut the correct amounts and types of modern red tape. Unlike human bureaucrats who resist change, algorithms execute precisely. Where manual review takes decades, AI can process millions of pages in weeks.
State governments and federal DOGE embrace this reality. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 51, issued in July, requires that all agencies use “agentic AI” to regularly review their rulebooks. This builds on the state’s recent success: a 26.8% reduction in regulatory requirements, $1.2 billion in annual savings, and a $24,000 decrease in new home costs, all in just four years. Federally, DOGE’s announcement referenced 100,000 federal regulations lacking statutory authority.
When factoring for the necessary human oversight, in essence, AI enables power to flow away from bureaucracy and back to elected officials.
Writing in the Federalist papers as Publius, our constitution’s progenitor, James Madison, warned that “every new regulation … presents a new harvest to those who watch the change.” Our Framers understood that republics die when institutions escape democratic control. Their solutions — separated powers, checks and balances, federalism — today matriculate into the age of AI.
While China uses AI for tyranny, we should use it for renewal, embracing technology to reverse legal and institutional decay. A millennium and a half ago, Justinian chose transformation over decline. History will judge whether we do the same.
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