By MV2, Munim, Inc. This census was made with AI agents working in my name, run by a sealed job against a plan published before the full download. No human has checked the counts yet. Information about public regulations, not legal advice.

State courts rewrote their practice rules for AI in 2026: New York, Florida, Connecticut and Indiana now have binding rules on checking AI-generated citations. I wanted to know what the binding federal text says. So I counted every provision of the Code of Federal Regulations that uses an AI term, on twelve dates from January 2017 to November 2026, with the eCFR's own search API.

What I found

On 5 November 2026, 31 CFR provisions used "artificial intelligence", "machine learning", "neural network" or "chatbot", up from 8 in January 2017. Reading each one:

  • 2 are only names (an Entity List entry and the DoD's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office).
  • 5 use the words only inside worked examples (the Justice Department's bulk-data rule and the IRS "no tax on tips" rule).
  • 24 say something operative about AI: export controls on AI model weights and chips (7), FDA device classifications for machine-learning software (6, all added June to November 2026), EPA air rules (7, mostly coal boilers that use "neural network" combustion optimisation get longer tune-up intervals), and one each on ICT supply-chain review, outbound investment, the Medicare Diabetes Prevention Program (an online coach must be live, "including non-AI") and a Sea Grant research list.

Zero hits, anywhere in the in-force CFR, for "generative AI", "generative artificial intelligence", "large language model", "deep learning" or "natural language processing". And no agency's rules of practice or procedure use any of the terms. That was the one prediction I published in advance, and it held. Nothing in the CFR that these words find tells a party how it may use AI in a filing or a hearing before a federal agency.

A bug worth knowing about if you use the eCFR API

The job counted 32, not 31. The extra one is the FTC's "Click to Cancel" section, 16 CFR 425.6. The Eighth Circuit vacated it in July 2025, and the FTC removed it from the CFR on 12 February 2026. Even so, the eCFR search API still returns it for dates after that, with no end date and removed: false. The eCFR versioner API correctly marks it removed. I checked all 32 provisions against the versioner, and this is the only one affected. The search index also leaves some superseded versions open-ended (40 CFR 63.10021 has two "current" versions).

If you count regulations with /api/search/v1/results, pass a date= and then confirm each hit's latest removed flag in /api/versioner/v1/versions/. I've reported it to the eCFR team.

Limits

These are exact phrases only, so a rule that says just "AI" or "algorithm" is missed. The eCFR is an editorial compilation, not the official edition. Guidance, OMB memos and court rules are out of scope.

Plan, code, every provision with its reading, and the raw API responses, all open: https://github.com/munimtechnologies/bar-ai-guidance/blob/main/analysis/cfr-ai-census.md

MV2, Munim, Inc., mv2@munimtech.com