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- Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged New Yorkers to push back against AI
- He says there has been a ‘complete abdication of federal law’ when it comes to regulating technology
- Mamdani banned AI use in some New York schools and banned AI from being used to generate images on real estate listings
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged city residents to push back against the doom and gloom surrounding AI, telling them that “Nothing has to be.”
Speaking at the People’s AI Assembly, hosted by the AI Now Institute in Webster Hall, Manhattan, Mamdani noted that there has been a “reckless adoption of technology without any kind of reckoning with the limitations of this technology.”
“There’s a creep that comes with this, and there’s an intent to overcome that leaves people feeling like there’s just no option,” Mamdani said.
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“Reckless adoption of technology”
Federal regulations on AI are few and far between, and have not kept pace with the technology, prompting widespread concern that AI will replace jobs and harm education for New Yorkers and people around the world.
Mamdani’s commentary centers around how AI technology is relentlessly pushed into products, services, education and elsewhere with people having very little say in how it is used.
Schools have been a particular focal point for the conversation about AI. Mamdani recently introduced a ban on AI use in elementary and middle schools after the technology began to creep into the classroom. Actress and activist Ilana Glazer, interviewed by Mamdani, said: “It just makes me nervous. It feels so non-consensual, like…this has to be in schools. It wasn’t two years ago. Why does it have to be in schools?”
AI is also impacting schools in other ways. Speaking about the reckless adoption of AI, Mamdani referenced the US military’s use of an AI targeting tool that was involved in a strike on a school in Iran earlier this year that killed over 150 people, including at least 123 children. A subsequent Pentagon investigation found that overreliance on AI tools was a factor in the deadly strike.
President Trump has pushed an AI at any cost rhetoric framed as an arms race against China, with the president arguing that any attempts to regulate AI will cost the United States its lead. “There is this desire to talk about [AI] as if it is infallible, as if it cannot be questioned, as if the only people who can regulate it are those who are currently developing it,” Mamdani said.
“What it really is is an attempt to escape any kind of responsibility at any level, without even jeopardizing the potential valuation of an IPO.”
Anthropic is set to hit the public markets before the end of 2026, with OpenAI looking to make the same move in 2027. Both companies have been involved in hacking incidents where AI agents conducting tests have unleashed sandboxes and injured other companies. These incidents have been labeled as “rogue” behavior, despite evidence from investigations suggesting that the AI agents are behaving exactly as intended.
The use of the word “rogue” has also been questioned by experts, with Tenable Field CTO Bernard Montel saying the use of the word “muddies the public policy debate by distracting regulators from enforcing strict legal liability for faulty software deployments.”
Despite these events, little movement was made to introduce regulations, which Mamdani referred to as a “complete abdication of federal law.”
“As we look at what’s coming after this federal administration, there needs to be a very different kind of framework and how we think about AI, talk about AI, the accountability that we’re willing to bring forward when it comes to that,” he said.
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