Can AI read the rules for greener buildings? We put it to work in 119 cities Ritula AnandJayashree Srinivasan October 08, 2026 This page in: English

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/can-ai-read-the-rules-for-greener-buildings--we-put-it-to-work-i Can AI read and cite building energy laws across 119 cities? That is the data collection challenge behind the next edition of Building Green, the World Bank Group’s dataset on building energy codes and their enforcement, due in spring 2027. The dataset pairs two types of data: what the law requires, researched from published legal sources, and what happens in practice, reported by local experts. For the legal half, we put AI to the test: OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 Mini drafted answers to 60 legal questions per city, each tied to an exact excerpt from the law; Anthropic’s Claude independently reviewed the legal basis; and analysts checked every answer. In the first 21 economies reviewed, about four in five answers were correct, at roughly US$27 per city in model costs and an estimated 1,500 researcher hours saved.