‘Five years in AI is an eternity’: Inside Pittsburgh’s work to govern a technology moving too fast to predict

By the time generative AI tools like ChatGPT went mainstream in 2023, Pittsburgh city employees weren’t waiting for permission to use them, according to Andrew Hayhurst, the city’s senior manager of innovation.

“Immediately, we start seeing people on our network using it,” Hayhurst said to a room full of technologists gathered in Bakery Square for a local innovation summit in April. “There was a big kind of scare and push and decision that had to be made. Do we block AI, or do we try to figure out a better way?”

The city decided to work with it, creating standards for generative AI usage. The early policy, which became public in 2024 through a series of Public Source articles, was largely restrictive, designed to curb risky behavior like putting private resident data into commercial AI tools.