Governor Hochul Deploys AI to Purge Outdated Laws — Including One About Pregnant Workers

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Key takeaways

Governor Hochul's team is using AI to review all New York state rules and regulations for outdated or obsolete legislation.
The AI-driven audit is expected to compress what would have been a five-year manual review into a dramatically shorter timeline.
Flagged laws include a $25 dog hunting fee and a midnight work permit requirement for pregnant individuals.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is turning to artificial intelligence to do the kind of bureaucratic heavy lifting that would normally consume years of government staff time. Speaking on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, Hochul revealed that her team is actively deploying AI tools to analyze every rule, regulation, and policy on the state's books — hunting for legislation that has long since outlived its usefulness. The initiative marks an interesting posture for a governor who recently signed a moratorium on new AI data centers within the state, underscoring that her concerns about AI infrastructure don't extend to rejecting the technology outright.

The sheer scale of what Hochul's team is undertaking becomes clear when you consider what they're finding. Among the laws flagged as outdated is a requirement that anyone taking a dog on a hunting trip pay a $25 fee, as well as a provision mandating that pregnant individuals obtain a special permit before working past midnight. These are the kinds of rules that accumulate quietly over decades, rarely challenged because no one has the bandwidth to systematically identify them — until now.

Hochul emphasized during the interview that conducting this kind of regulatory audit through traditional means would have taken approximately five years at the staff level. By deploying AI to sort through the legislative archive, the administration is compressing that timeline dramatically, potentially surfacing dozens or even hundreds of outdated statutes in a fraction of the time. It's a use case that highlights how government bodies are beginning to find practical, low-controversy applications for AI technology outside the private sector.

The move reflects a broader trend of state and local governments experimenting with AI to modernize administrative processes. Rather than pursuing splashy consumer-facing applications, many governments are quietly piloting AI in back-office functions — from processing permits to reviewing contracts — where the tools can demonstrate clear efficiency gains without raising the same ethical alarm bells that accompany AI in policing or social services.

New York's regulatory review project could serve as a template for other states looking for pragmatic AI applications. If the initiative successfully identifies and removes obsolete laws, it will offer a tangible, bipartisan-friendly argument for AI adoption in government — one grounded not in futurism but in basic administrative housekeeping that saves taxpayer resources and modernizes the legal framework citizens actually live under.

The bigger picture

What makes Hochul's AI regulatory audit particularly noteworthy isn't the technology itself — it's the framing. Governments have long struggled to articulate compelling public-sector use cases for AI that don't immediately invite skepticism or fears about surveillance and automation replacing workers. Using AI to eliminate a rule requiring pregnant people to get a permit to work nights is the kind of concrete, human-centered outcome that cuts through the noise. It's hard to argue against that.

There's also a political dimension worth examining. Hochul signed a moratorium on new AI data centers in New York, a move that drew criticism from tech industry voices who saw it as anti-innovation. By publicizing her administration's own AI adoption, she's effectively threading a needle — positioning herself as an AI pragmatist rather than an AI skeptic. This is savvy governance communication: signal concern about infrastructure and environmental impact while demonstrating enthusiasm for the technology's practical applications.

For the broader AI industry, stories like this matter because they normalize AI in civic life without the baggage of controversial deployments. Governments adopting AI for regulatory review, document processing, or archival research are the kinds of partnerships that AI companies need to build public trust. Readers should watch whether other state governments follow New York's lead, and whether the results of this audit are made public — transparency about what laws get cut and why will be critical to its long-term credibility.

LagPing's take

We're covering this story at LagPing because it represents exactly the kind of AI deployment that tends to get lost between the hype cycles — practical, procedural, and quietly impactful. It's easy to write about ChatGPT upgrades or AI-generated art controversies, but the ways AI is beginning to reshape how governments actually function deserves just as much attention. Governor Hochul's regulatory audit is a real-world stress test of AI's ability to handle complex, high-volume document analysis, and the results could influence how dozens of other states think about their own administrative tech stacks. We also think the tension between her data center moratorium and her team's active AI use is a story in itself — it illustrates how nuanced the political conversation around AI has become, even within a single administration. This is a story we'll be keeping an eye on as the audit progresses.

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