Justinian — Virginia's Statewide AI System for Rewriting and Cutting State Regulations

In July 2025, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin directed every state agency to run its regulations through Justinian, an AI system built by the Y Combinator-backed startup Vulcan Technologies, as part of a push to cut the volume of Virginia's regulatory code. The state's existing Office of Regulatory Management had already achieved a 26.8% reduction in regulatory requirements through a multi-year manual review predating the AI tool; Youngkin's stated ambition with Justinian is to reach 35–50% overall.

Justinian works by ingesting the commonwealth's regulations alongside relevant state and federal law, splitting them into discrete provisions, and running concurrent AI agents — trained on American case law — to identify redundant, obsolete, or ultra vires (legally unauthorized) rules and draft possible rewrites for human reviewers. Vulcan's initial engagement was a three-month, $150,000 contract running through August 2025, covering agency-by-agency recommendations, an economic-impact analysis, and a roadmap for a statewide rollout; Vulcan has separately raised a $10.9 million seed round to expand the product to other state and federal government clients.

Coverage of the rollout, including reporting that cites regulatory-policy academics questioning how rule changes generated by an opaque AI process will be validated, has raised open questions about how Virginia will audit Justinian's recommendations for legal accuracy and unintended consequences before they take effect, and about what happens to the tool's output once the initial contract period ends. The Commonwealth has publicly committed to an economic-impact review and a phased rollout plan, but as of this evaluation no independent, published audit of Justinian-generated rule changes exists.

Read the full analysis: https://www.vpm.org/news/2025-09-25/glenn-youngkin-vulcan-tech-ai-state-regulations-jones-bull-coglianese