The trackers read signed laws, not bills
The trackers start from the New York State Senate's Open Legislation API, which publishes every bill since the 2009 session with its full text, its sponsors and each action it takes on the way to the governor. Only bills the governor signed into law are read for duties and powers, 7,758 of them so far, while the Bill Explorer covers every bill and resolution, signed or not.
A duty is something a government body must do, and a power is something it may do
A duty is a requirement a law places on a state or local government body, such as a report due by a date, a rule to adopt or a program to run, and a power is an authority a law grants, such as the right to issue permits, set fees or keep running a program an earlier law was set to end. A record counts only when the law creates it or widens it in new matter, so reprinted text, definitions, conditions attached to another record and duties of private parties or individuals are left out, and a duty that adds a deadline or a new group to an existing one is marked as extending an existing duty.
Claude reads each law, and the pipeline checks what it reads
Claude reads the marked text of each signed law, where new matter is set apart from the text it amends, and lists the duties and powers with the sentence each comes from. The pipeline then keeps a record only if its sentence is found in the law, drops the kinds of text listed above, resolves each actor to a canonical agency through a crosswalk of state and local bodies, and reads the law's effective-date clause so every deadline is dated from the day the law actually takes effect. Sessions 2009 through 2023 were read by Claude on the Max plan between October and November 2026, and most of the 2025 session was read through the Claude API on November 12, 2026.
Two auditors check a blind sample every night
Each night two auditors read 20 laws extracted or revised that day without seeing the stored records first, list what each law requires and allows, and then compare their lists with the records, and every class of error they confirm is fixed in the pipeline and across the whole database the same night. The results are scored against a hand-verified set of 552 laws, where 94.6% of stored records are real duties or powers, 80.6% are right in every field, and 89.4% of the provisions in those laws are found.
What the trackers still miss
Some laws are not yet covered: 43 long laws, mostly budget bills and recodifications, are being read section by section, and laws whose first reading missed provisions are being read again, up to 250 a night. When an amending law extends an earlier law's expiration date without naming the agency that holds the extended authority, the record says that the holder is not named in the amending law, and multi-state compact bodies in which New York takes part are marked as such.
How often the trackers update
The bill index refreshes daily from the Senate's change feed, newly signed laws are added every Monday, and the nightly cycle reads them, re-reads earlier laws and rebuilds these pages. Corrections are welcome at [email protected].