New York Is Using AI to Hunt Down Its Own Dumbest Laws

Key points

• New York Governor Kathy Hochul confirmed her team used AI to review every state rule, regulation and policy for outdated legislation.
• The review, which Hochul says would have taken five years by hand, was completed in a couple of months.
• Outdated laws flagged include a $25 fee to take a dog hunting and a requirement that pregnant people obtain a permit to work after midnight.
• Earlier this week, New York became the first US state to place a pause of up to one year on new hyperscale data centers, the giant warehouse-scale computing facilities that power AI services.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has a straightforward pitch for AI in government: use it to find the rules nobody remembers writing.

In an interview with Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, first reported by The Verge AI, Hochul described feeding the state's entire library of rules, regulations and policies into an AI system, a large language model similar to the technology behind ChatGPT, to flag laws that have outlived their purpose.

The results were striking. The scan turned up a $25 fee required to take a dog hunting. It found a law saying pregnant people need a special permit before they can work past midnight. Neither rule reflects how New York actually works today.

"It probably would have taken five years at the staff level," Hochul said. "With AI, we did it in a couple of months."

The governor says the findings will let her and state agencies move to repeal the outdated rules. She framed it as using government more efficiently rather than expanding it. "I want a government that's not on your back but on your side," she told Bloomberg.

Does this mean AI is now writing New York's laws?

No. The AI is reading laws, not writing them. The system flags candidates for removal; human officials and lawmakers decide what actually changes. That distinction matters. An AI can search a document library at speed. Deciding whether a rule should survive is still a political and legal judgment call.

The announcement sits alongside a piece of news that points in a different direction. Earlier this week, New York signed a moratorium, a temporary freeze, on new hyperscale data centers in the state for up to one year. State lawmakers want time to write rules protecting residents from the rising electricity costs and the pressure on natural resources that come with building and running massive AI infrastructure.

So New York is, at the same moment, embracing AI as a government tool and putting the brakes on the physical infrastructure that makes AI run. Hochul did not treat those positions as contradictory. Using existing AI tools is different from approving new facilities that consume huge amounts of power and water.

For ordinary residents, the practical upshot is modest for now. Archaic rules that affect real people, like permit requirements tied to pregnancy, could disappear faster than they would through a traditional legislative review. That is a genuine, if unglamorous, benefit.

"I'm going to make dramatic changes using the power of AI," Hochul said.

What to watch: check whether the rules flagged by the AI review actually reach a repeal vote, and how long that process takes compared to the months the scan itself required.