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• New York Governor Kathy Hochul confirmed her team used AI to review every state rule and policy for outdated legislation.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• Outdated laws flagged include a $25 fee to take a dog hunting and a requirement that pregnant people obtain a permit to work after midnight.
• New York is separately the first US state to place a pause of up to one year on new hyperscale data centres, 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.

Speaking on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, Hochul described feeding the state's entire library of rules 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 interview was first reported by The Verge AI.

The scan turned up a $25 fee required to take a dog hunting and a law saying pregnant people need a special permit before they can work past midnight. Neither reflects how New York actually operates 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The findings will let her and state agencies move to repeal outdated rules. She framed it as efficiency rather than expansion. "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 reads laws; it does not write them. The system flags candidates for removal, and human officials decide what actually changes. That distinction matters: an AI can search a document library at speed, but deciding whether a rule should survive is still a political and legal judgment.

This sits alongside news pointing in a different direction. We reported on 14 July 2026 that Hochul signed a moratorium, a temporary freeze, on new hyperscale data centres in the state for up to one year, giving lawmakers time to write rules protecting residents from rising electricity costs and pressure on natural resources. The president has since demanded the order be reversed, as we covered the following day.

So New York is, at the same time, adopting AI as a government tool and restricting the physical infrastructure that makes AI run. Hochul didn't treat those positions as contradictory. Using existing AI tools is different from approving new facilities that consume huge amounts of power and water.

Should you worry about archaic rules affecting you?

For most residents, the practical upshot is modest for now. Rules tied to outdated assumptions, like permit requirements linked to pregnancy, could disappear faster than through traditional legislative review. That's a real, if unglamorous, benefit.

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

The thing to watch is whether the rules the AI flagged actually reach a repeal vote, and how long that process takes compared to the months the scan itself required. Speed in finding bad laws is not the same as speed in killing them.