New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said her administration is using artificial intelligence to review the state’s rulebook for stale, odd, or outdated requirements, a government housekeeping job that usually dies in a filing cabinet.
In an interview with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Hochul said her team is using AI to examine “every single rule, regulation, [and] policy” in New York. The aim, according to Hochul, is to identify laws and requirements that no longer make sense.
The timing is awkward in the usual AI-politics way. The Verge reported that Hochul recently signed a moratorium on new AI data centers in New York. That does not amount to a rejection of AI as a tool inside state government, and Hochul is now pointing to one concrete administrative use: reading through a sprawling legal and regulatory corpus faster than staff could do it by hand.
What Hochul says the system is finding
Hochul gave Bloomberg two examples of rules she described as antiquated. One was a $25 fee tied to taking a dog hunting. Another was a requirement that pregnant people obtain a permit to work after midnight.
Those examples are the kind of low-glamour government cruft that tends to survive because reviewing it is slow, boring, and nobody gets a ribbon-cutting ceremony for deleting a bad rule. Hochul said that doing the review “at the staff level” probably would have taken five years.
The mechanism, at least as described publicly, is straightforward: Hochul’s team is using AI to read across New York’s rules, regulations, and policies, then surface candidates for review. The important word is “candidates.” Hochul did not say in the Bloomberg interview that software is rewriting state law by itself, nor would a model scanning documents be a substitute for the legal and political process required to repeal or amend rules.
The claim is narrower and more plausible: a model can be pointed at a large body of text and asked to find provisions that look outdated, inconsistent, or strange. Human officials still have to decide whether the software found a real problem, whether the rule has some hidden legal purpose, and what to do about it.
Hochul’s comments also show the split that now defines a lot of state AI policy. New York can restrict new AI data-center development while still using AI inside government operations. Those are separate decisions: one concerns infrastructure and its costs; the other concerns whether state employees can use software to triage paperwork.
Hochul did not, in the reported remarks, identify the AI system being used, name a vendor, describe accuracy checks, or say how many rules the review has flagged. That leaves the most useful details unanswered. For now, the confirmed claim is that New York’s governor says her team is applying AI to the state’s accumulated rulebook, starting with the parts that look old enough to creak.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge AI.