CentreAI Codify is an open-source tool that helps any government turn its statute book into structured, machine-readable law.
To make effective policy, governments need a clear picture of the laws already on the books. But as these accumulate over decades – and even centuries – these bodies of law can grow so complex that leaders and policymakers are not always sure what legislation is actually in effect, nor how individual laws may affect one another. This is the problem we built CentreAI Codify to solve.
In the UK, the challenge came into sharp focus in 2008, in the Court of Appeal case R v Chambers. The court was preparing to uphold a confiscation order when a prosecution lawyer spotted a problem the day before judgment was due: the regulations on which the order relied had ceased to apply seven years prior. The court instead quashed the order.
In the years that followed, the UK government invested millions of pounds and thousands of hours of civil-service time in digitising legislation, launching legislation.gov.uk in 2010. Sixteen years later, that effort has made the UK’s statute book among the most digitised and transparent in the world.
Many governments around the world, however, lack the resources and personnel to achieve that same level of digitisation. For those governments, the law remains locked behind tomes of paper (or, if they have done some digitisation, thousands of scanned PDFs), out of reach.
Artificial intelligence offers the opportunity to structure the unstructured: making law readable to machines, accessible to citizens for open justice and clear for businesses trying to navigate a government’s regulatory context. When the World Bank asked 754 executives of multinational companies what shaped their decisions to invest in developing countries, 86 per cent named a business-friendly legal and regulatory environment as important or critically important, level with political stability and far ahead of low tax rates or cheap labour.[_] This is more than just civil-service or legal productivity. This is opening up deeper questions of economics and international competitiveness.
At TBI, we hear a common refrain from political leaders: once they achieve power, they feel that pulling a policy lever produces no result. Much of this stems from what we call “legislative debt”. Borrowed from the software-engineering concept of technical debt, it refers to how legislative decisions that have accumulated over decades – and, in some cases, centuries – coalesce into complex legal systems that are difficult to operate and understand.
A modern state must continually optimise itself to remain relevant and deliver public services in an ever-changing world. That challenge can only be met by establishing a structured view of the law that keeps human lawmakers at the centre of determining future policy directions.
The bottleneck in legibility has never been will; it has been skilled editorial labour. Structuring a statute book means reading every provision, recognising what kind of thing it is and recording how it relates to everything else. That work has been irreducibly manual, one qualified pair of eyes at a time, which is why it is the preserve of wealthy states with long institutional memories.
CentreAI Codify uses recent advances in AI models to convert a government’s law into the Akoma Ntoso international standard. Akoma Ntoso was first developed from 2004 through a United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs project helping African parliaments adopt digital tools, and it has been an OASIS international standard since 2018. It is now used by legislatures and institutions from Kenya to the European Union.
We built Codify with a similar global scope in mind. The system is designed to work just as well in Arabic or Ukrainian as it does in English. Our focus on language also extends to translation: we’ve adapted methods from the UN for technical translation. Codify can comb through the original law for legal terminology and deontic conventions to ensure every aspect of its translation is faithful to the original text. The time for lengthy legal translation is now minutes, not months.
Codify Core is open source, so any government can adopt and inspect the code. Alongside the conversion engine, we are releasing three components: a web application frontend for publishing and browsing digitised legislation; an API, built on open standards, that can provide a direct or AI-enhanced search for the resulting data on a government’s existing legislation website; and an MCP server, so that AI assistants and agents can query a body of law directly. Codify has been built and tested across multiple languages and writing systems, including Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin scripts.
Once digitised, the law becomes a substrate for legislative and regulatory reform. Take a minister who wants small businesses to be able to register online in a single day. Today, finding out what stands in the way means weeks of legal research across acts, regulations and amendments. With the statute book structured, the same question can be answered in minutes: which provisions govern registration, which still require a paper signature or an in-person visit, and which would need amending. Combined with our broader Policy suite, this forms the foundations of an operating system for the Reimagined State.
We invite both national governments and local-government bodies to get in touch. And from the open-source community, we welcome collaboration and feedback to help develop this tool into an open workbench for the craft of lawmaking.