Hochul Used AI to Scan NY's Entire Legal Code in 'a Couple of Months'

Here’s a jarring juxtaposition for you: Governor Kathy Hochul just signed a moratorium pausing new AI data centers in New York, yet she’s simultaneously boasting about leveraging the technology to overhaul the state’s entire legal apparatus. It’s a striking split screen that highlights the growing divide between the physical infrastructure of AI and its software applications in government. Speaking on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Hochul detailed how her administration deployed artificial intelligence to analyze every single rule, regulation, and policy on the books in New York.

This isn’t a small cleanup job. The Governor pointed to genuinely archaic statutes the AI dredged up, like a $25 fee required just to take a dog hunting, or a bizarre stipulation that pregnant people need a permit to work after midnight. Hochul estimated that a manual review by staff would have been a slog spanning roughly five years. Instead, she claims the AI-assisted audit was wrapped up in a couple of months. That’s an efficiency ratio that would make any management consultant’s jaw drop, compressing a half-decade of bureaucratic drudgery into a single fiscal quarter.

The timing, however, is what makes your head spin. Just days before this interview, Hochul made New York the first state in the nation to slam the brakes on new hyperscale data centers for up to a year. The goal of that moratorium is to buy lawmakers time to figure out how to protect residents from skyrocketing utility costs and stressed natural resources—the very environmental toll exacted by the computing power that made her regulatory project possible. She’s effectively saying the output is worth the input, at least on the software side.

Hochul framed her vision in starkly populist terms, telling Bloomberg she wants a government that’s not on your back but on your side. She didn’t stop at state-level governance either, urging every level of government to adopt similar AI tools. “I’m going to make dramatic changes using the power of AI,” she said. Whether that kind of sweeping deregulatory push, supercharged by the technology she’s simultaneously restricting at the infrastructure level, becomes a national blueprint remains an open question—and one that other governors will likely be watching very closely.