These days, everything seems to be powered, augmented or enhanced by artificial intelligence: phones, software, movies, etc.
Now, add the state of Vermont to that list. For the past few months, all Vermont state employees have had access to a bespoke AI chatbot named — of course — ChatVT.
“It doesn’t look that exciting,” Josiah Raiche, Vermont’s chief data and AI officer, said in an interview last month. “It looks like ChatGPT, basically, with some Vermont logos on it.”
ChatVT has been available to all Vermont state employees since early 2025. Roughly 300 employees use it each week, Raiche said in April, for a variety of tasks: rewriting text on state websites to be more accessible to the public, coding state software, data processing, drafting and summarizing lengthy reports.
In different areas of state government, the bot is trained with different documents: “Based on the teams that you’re in, the tool will have access to policies and background information that’s relevant,” Raiche said.
State IT staffers built the bot with technology from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, but with added privacy protections.
“That all happens in a way that OpenAI doesn’t get access to our data,” Raiche said. “All of our data stays in our environment.” The tool costs the state roughly $300 a month in computing expenses.
Last month, Raiche gave a reporter a demonstration of the chatbot: He copied and pasted language from a piece of legislation into a text field and told the AI that he runs a state technology division. “What areas of this bill should I focus on?” he asked. “What additional work might this make for my team?”
ChatVT responded with a list of potential topics to look at, including “data security and privacy protocols” and “legal and compliance monitoring.”
The response looked professionally done and comprehensive — something that Raiche said could be misleading. He gave another example in which he asked the bot to provide a recipe for eggs Benedict, in a bureaucratic style suitable for the Federal Register.
It complied with a report of the “components, historical context, preparation methodology, variations, and nutritional data” of the dish.
“Like, this looks like good content, but this is useless,” Raiche said.
The bot is an example of why the Agency of Digital Services describes Vermont as a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in state government. According to Denise Reilly-Hughes, who leads the agency, Vermont was the first in the nation to have a state AI director, and the first to have a state AI council, both of which were created in 2022’s Act 132.
Dozens of other states have since followed in Vermont’s footsteps, Reilly-Hughes said.
“Vermont has been ahead of the curve,” she said.
— Peter D’Auria
In the know
The Vermont Senate voted Thursday to scrap its version of this year’s landmark education bill, H.454, and replace it with the version of the legislation that the House passed last month. Following an afternoon of committee hearings on a proposed amendment to the bill, senators were planning to consider changes to it on the floor Thursday evening — though it wasn’t clear when they’d arrive at a final version.
In effect, the decision backtracked on weeks of work by the chamber’s education and tax-writing committees. It came less than 48 hours after Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, conceded to his colleagues within the chamber’s Democratic majority that the Senate-crafted proposal had lost substantial support.
“This idea that we will take the House legislation — and we will amend it, make it better — that will require a lot of work on the floor, a lot of work from our committees,” Baruth said on the floor Thursday morning before making the procedural moves that allowed the chamber to tee up the House’s proposed bill, rather than the Senate’s proposal.
Even after all that work, Baruth then acknowledged, the legislation still “may not” get enough votes to pass.
The Senate only took up H.454 briefly on Thursday morning. During an afternoon session of voting on other bills, Baruth said he hoped to dive into substantial debate on a potential amendment to the House language, offered by Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, on the Senate floor that evening.
Read more about the proposed amendment here.
— Shaun Robinson
On the move
Gov. Phil Scott signed lawmakers’ state budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year into law Wednesday. The plan lays out $9.01 billion in state spending for the yearlong period starting July 1 — and includes a handful of new measures designed to limit the impacts of potential cuts to the state’s federal funding.
Scott, a Republican, was notably complimentary of the House and Senate’s budget bill in a letter to legislators that accompanied his signature. Democratic leadership in both chambers, knowing they almost certainly could not override a budget veto this year, trimmed tens of millions of dollars in proposed “base” spending — money expected to be appropriated year-over-year — from the legislation after Scott insisted on cuts.
The governor had proposed an $8.99 billion state budget in January.
“I appreciate that this budget makes important affordability investments,” Scott wrote, pointing to lawmakers’ use of about $75 million from the state’s general fund that’s expected to help reduce the property tax bills people pay to support education, among other measures.
Read more about the 2026 budget here.
— Shaun Robinson
Scott also signed two Senate bills into law Wednesday that immigrant rights advocates have said would bolster protections for communities they serve as the Trump administration continues its crackdown of federal immigration laws in Vermont and across the country.
The governor approved S.56, which sets up a committee to study whether the state should create a new office coordinating social and economic services for people who have recently arrived in the state from other countries. He also signed S.44, which further restricts how state and local law enforcement agencies can enter into policing agreements with federal immigration enforcement officials, short of getting the governor’s approval to do so.
The latter drew fairly rare praise for Scott from the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, with Falko Schilling, a lobbyist for the organization, calling it “another important step forward in building the state’s firewall against federal overreach” in a statement Wednesday.
— Shaun Robinson
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