San Francisco's Chapter 22J — a Mandatory, Annually Refreshed Public Inventory of City AI Systems

In December 2024 San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed Ordinance 288-24 (Administrative Code Chapter 22J), sponsored by Supervisor Hillary Ronen. It requires the city's Chief Information Officer to maintain a public inventory of AI the city uses. Departments and vendors must answer 22 standardised questions per AI technology; AI used solely for internal administration or cybersecurity is excluded.
Each department submits an inventory annually through a standard intake form; the Department of Technology reviews and consolidates the submissions. The result is published as open data on data.sf.gov (CSV, JSON, XML; one row per reported AI technology, 22 columns, public-domain licence). The dataset was first published on 15 January 2026 and last updated on 6 August 2026.
The context was a visibility gap: the sponsor said the Department of Technology 'had no idea what AI the city was using', because most departments run their own IT units. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Saira Hussain warned that a self-reported survey is not independent analysis of tools that decide service eligibility.
Caveats: the city itself describes the dataset as preliminary and possibly incomplete, and the sources consulted do not give a count of systems, any measured effect on outcomes, or an independent audit of completeness. The practice is evidenced as a transparency mechanism, not yet as a proven change in results.

Read the full analysis: https://www.sfbos.org/sites/default/files/o0288-24.pdf