New York Governor Kathy Hochul said her team used AI to read through every rule, regulation, and policy in New York State. What she estimated would take five years of staff time was done in "a couple of months." Hochul shared the news on July 15, 2026, during an appearance on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, hosted by Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway (The Verge).

The AI review found outdated laws Hochul wants to remove. She gave two examples: a $25 fee required to take a dog hunting, and a rule requiring pregnant people to get a permit just to work after midnight. Both come from eras long before today's regulatory systems and had never been caught through normal review processes.

Hochul described the effort as part of a larger goal to cut bureaucratic red tape. "I want a government that's not on your back but on your side, and using AI has been powerful to do that," she said (The Verge). She encouraged other governments to follow suit: "I think every level of government should use this… I'm going to make dramatic changes using the power of AI."

The Odd Lots episode, titled "NY Governor Kathy Hochul on Her One Year Data Center Moratorium," covered more than the regulatory audit. Earlier that same week, New York became the first state to pause new construction of large-scale data centers for up to one year. Data centers are the giant warehouse-like facilities that house the powerful computers running AI systems, and they consume enormous amounts of electricity. The pause gives the state time to develop rules protecting the environment and power grid (AP News; The Verge). Bloomberg also published a related Odd Lots newsletter article on July 15 titled "The Optimistic Case for the Hochul Data Center Pause."

The regulatory review ties into a formal policy Hochul launched earlier in July. On July 8, she issued an Executive Order starting what her office called a "Regulatory Reset," a thorough review of thousands of state regulations (governor.ny.gov). The AI analysis appears to be the tool powering that effort, giving agencies an organized list of rules to act on.

Hochul's AI policy goes beyond cutting regulations. In March 2026, she launched the FutureWorks Commission to guide policy and private-sector responses to the impact of AI on workers across New York (governor.ny.gov). In January, she announced she wants to prohibit political campaigns from spreading AI-generated images of people (NYT on Facebook). Together, these moves paint a picture of a governor who is comfortable using AI inside government, cautious about the physical infrastructure AI requires, and restrictive about its potential to spread disinformation.

The broader context here is a striking contrast. A governor who just paused data center construction to protect the power grid is also promoting AI as a tool to overhaul the state's regulations. There is no real contradiction: the data center pause targets the massive computing facilities that strain electricity supplies, while the regulatory review is essentially a reading and sorting task that does not require heavy computing power. Still, the timing shows how quickly AI has shifted from being an infrastructure concern to a practical tool used inside state government.

The more important question is what "dramatic changes" will actually look like. Hochul says the AI analysis will let her and state agencies eliminate outdated regulations. What she has not detailed is the process for reviewing and validating those eliminations before they take effect. An AI system can flag an old law, but actually repealing a regulation involves public comment periods, agency review, and often a vote by the legislature. The five-year estimate for manual review likely includes all those procedural steps. The two-month AI timeline almost certainly does not.

That gap between finding a problem and fixing it is where the real work begins. An AI system can read through all of New York's rules, flag the ones that reference outdated technologies or odd fees, and hand human reviewers a sorted list. That is genuinely useful and would have been far too expensive to do at this scale even three years ago. But it is a sorting tool, not a law-repealing machine.

Hochul is presenting AI as a way to make government leaner and more responsive. That argument holds up if the process includes the careful review that changing regulations demands. The two examples she cited, a hunting-dog fee and a midnight-work permit for pregnant people, are the easy cases: clearly outdated, widely agreed upon, and politically simple to remove. The harder test comes when the AI flags regulations that people still defend, or where "outdated" is itself a matter of debate.

For other governments watching from the outside, the New York experiment offers a model worth following. An executive order requiring review, AI as the scanning tool, and a public commitment to act on the results create a system that could speed up regulatory cleanup. Whether it actually does depends on what happens after the AI hands over its findings.