New York Governor Kathy Hochul Caves to Big Tech on AI Safety Bill

[Celerity]

A bill that passed the New York legislature was completely gutted and substituted with language perceived as friendlier to the industry.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/11/hochul-caves-big-tech-ai-safety-bill-new-york/


New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaking at the Urban League Empowerment Center in New York City, November 12, 2025. Credit: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul completely rewrote a bill passed by the state legislature intended to regulate artificial intelligence models to ensure public safety, substituting it with language favored by the same Big Tech interests that have held fundraisers for her in recent weeks.

The bill, known as the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Safety and Education (RAISE) Act, would in its original form have become the most expansive state-level regulation of AI for the testing and reporting of advanced “frontier” models. Co-authored by Assemblymember Alex Bores and Sen. Andrew Gounardes, the bill would put the onus on frontier model developers to create plans to make their models safer, proactively report “critical safety incidents,” and ban models deemed unsafe through testing from being released. It has been sitting on Hochul’s desk for months.

Stakeholders in New York have been described as apoplectic about Hochul’s changes, which weaken the bill in critical ways. In Washington, Donald Trump is vowing to sign an executive order that would hinder states from passing their own AI regulations. This is after a bid to establish a moratorium on state AI rules failed to make it into the annual defense policy bill. Bores and Gounardes joined a coalition letter of state lawmakers urging Congress not to block state AI regulations.

But Hochul’s gutting of the RAISE Act may make efforts like Trump’s to preempt state AI rules obsolete. Big Tech is playing a federal-state game, lobbying for Trump administration support to create obstacles to state AI rules while fighting those rules in state capitols. In New York, these companies appear to have won one round, which critics believe could rebound across the country and make it harder for states to combat the Trump-assisted effort to insulate AI from scrutiny.

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[Nictuku]

1. Disappointed!