Albanys sneaky AI law is a pricey union scam that will bust NYCs budget

New York City is staring down a $7.25 billion budget gap this coming fiscal year — and the savings trumpeted by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, including $100 million over two years in school-contract savings he bragged about last week, are barely a drop in the bucket.Artificial intelligence offers a once-in-a-generation chance to boost government productivity, lowering the city’s costs.Yet an obscure but significant state law known as the LOADinG Act threatens that opportunity.The statute began in 2023 as an AI-transparency bill for state agencies, with the stated purpose of establishing accountability and transparency for AI use in government decision-making — a reasonable and even worthwhile goal.Three years and three rounds of amendments later, however, the LOADinG Act has evolved from a law to protect the public to one that protects government employees.The accountability and transparency provisions were mostly removed.In their place is a legislative ban on government agencies using AI to displace employees, cut their hours, reduce their pay or benefits, or transfer “duties and functions currently performed” by a worker to an automated system.In simple terms, it guarantees that no civil servant will lose a job, or even a single task, to AI.These protections extend to school districts, SUNY, CUNY, and counties, cities, towns and villages — that is, nearly every public employer in the state.The law’s language covers “city” without qualification: no population threshold or NYC carve-out, unlike other state laws.So its protections, which were extended to city employees in February 2026, could have big budget implications for Gotham.While the law doesn’t outright ban city agencies from using AI, it effectively prohibits it where it could most effectively reorganize bureaucracy away from the staffers who are now doing it, making it impossible for managers to reassign and automate routine work like intake, triage, first-pass drafting and document review.A le...