Synopsis
Law-to-code is the practice of translating legal rules into machine-executable algorithms such as a Python code that software can automatically process and enforce without human intervention.Listen to this article in summarized format
The government is exploring a ‘law-to-code’ solution, converting legal provisions into automated software rules, to help ensure compliance with privacy and data protection laws against emerging AI-driven cyber threats, officials told ET.
Law-to-code is the practice of translating legal rules into machine-executable algorithms such as a Python code that software can automatically process and enforce without human intervention.
For instance, if an AI system attempts to access personal data without valid consent, the coded legal rule could automatically block the action. Similarly, if customer data is retained beyond the legally permissible duration, the system could trigger deletion workflows or compliance alerts automatically.
Policymakers in different countries have been trying the law-to-code concept on multiple use cases for some time. Countries like France and New Zealand, for example, have applied the solution to calculation-heavy administrative laws such as taxes, welfare and immigration eligibility. But it hasn’t yet been applied to abstract, rights-based laws like data privacy, which also carries hefty punitive consequences.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has discussed this solution with industry stakeholders over the past month as part of extensive consultations on the myriad impacts of advanced AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos, officials said.
“Since AI-powered cyberattacks can now operate at machine speed, governance also needs to be automated and applied at the same speed to counter such challenges,” a cybersecurity expert aware of the policy discussions said.
Models like Mythos are capable of identifying security flaws and system loopholes that decades of human expertise may have failed to detect. This exposes enterprise systems to rapid and real-time cyber attacks which would be impossible to control by human-controlled systems.
This dramatically raises the risk of large-scale breaches involving personal and sensitive data, thus exposing enterprises to hefty punitive consequences under the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023.
“We are supporting the industry with DPDP compliance,” one of the officials cited above said. “It’s a relatively new concept that’s been suggested, and we are looking into it.”
As a concept, law-to-code began to be used for official uses nearly 15 years back when France wrote a Python-based, open-source rules engine capable of calculating the entire French tax and social benefit code in 2011. It subsequently launched ‘MesAides’, a public simulator that lets citizens check what social benefits they qualified for by running their data against the encoded law.
In 2018, New Zealand launched the 'Better Rules, Better Outcomes' pilot programme to map property tax legislation and leave entitlement legislation into code models. The country formalised the Better Rules framework into an official methodology used by agencies to co-design regulations alongside programmers from day 1.
