Government and Civic · Community
The city attorney who used AI to find the reports nobody was reading
David Chiu, Daniel Ho, Andrea Bruss · San Francisco, CA, USA
San Francisco's 16-million-word municipal code had quietly grown hundreds of mandatory reports that almost no one read. City Attorney David Chiu and Stanford's RegLab built a tool to find them all, made his own staff check every one by hand, and the Board of Supervisors just voted on what to do about it.
The person and the place
David Chiu, City Attorney of San Francisco, working with Daniel Ho, Faculty Director of Stanford's Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab.
The problem David cared about
the city's code had swelled to nearly 16 million words and more than doubled its mandatory reporting requirements since 2000, to the point that, in Chiu's own words, "that makes systemic reform daunting."
The agency moment
Instead of accepting the code as unreadable, Chiu's office partnered with RegLab, which pointed a legal-research AI tool at the entire code to surface every reporting requirement buried in it. "The power of this technology is the ability to do something like this at scale, in a way that just would be infeasible for humans to do manually," Ho said. Then Chiu's own lawyers checked the machine's work: Director of Government Legal Reform Andrea Bruss said the tool "did not replace the need for us to individually evaluate the legal issues associated with every single one of these outputs."
What changed
The tool surfaced 528 reporting requirements, of which 488 could legally be changed. Chiu's office introduced a 351-page ordinance in June 2025 proposing to delete, modify, or consolidate 174 of them, 36% of everything on the table. The bill grew to 362 pages after a year of amendments, and on July 14, 2026 the Board of Supervisors passed it 7-4, with Supervisors Myrna Melgar, Connie Chan, Jackie Fielder, and Shamann Walton voting no. In the final two weeks, amendments restored several requirements the AI review had flagged for removal, including domestic-violence data sharing, sexual-harassment reporting, and small-business case-manager reporting, after named officials raised concerns; a surveillance-technology audit requirement was changed from annual to every five years over Supervisor Fielder's objection.
The move worth copying
The code got too big to read by hand, so the city attorney built something that could read it, made sure a human checked every page, and then let the elected body argue over what stayed. That division of labour is the part worth copying: let the machine read, keep a human on every page, and leave the arguing to the people elected to do it.
Chiu said he hopes San Francisco's code cleanup "serves as a model for us and other governments." — David Chiu, City Attorney of San Francisco, to the San Francisco Examiner
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
Sources last verified .
- Mission Local ↗
- San Francisco Examiner ↗
- Mission Local, an earlier report from the same outlet ↗
- City Attorney of San Francisco press release, a primary document republished verbatim by Stanford Law School ↗
- Reboot Democracy, an advocacy series that champions the project, background ↗
- Niskanen Center, a promotional listing for an event featuring the project's own participants, background ↗
