ALBANY, Sept. 27 — New York’s race for governor has become an unexpected testing ground for artificial intelligence policy, with Gov. Kathy Hochul rolling out transparency rules and a new state office while her Republican challenger, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, trains his fire on her data center moratorium. The contest matters beyond New York’s borders. With no standard federal AI regulations in place, states are trying to take the lead, and what Albany does — or refuses to do — tends to get copied.
Hochul has been touting the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, or RAISE, as a national model. Speaking at a press conference on Sept. 21, she framed the effort around accountability.
“I’ll make sure everybody knows who the good actors are and who the bad actors are,” she said. Here’s what it means in plain terms. The state is requiring big AI companies making at least $500 million to publicly post safety plans and report safety incidents within 72 hours.
But the threshold for what counts as serious harm is high: at least 50 deaths and $1 billion in financial loss. Kaitlin Asrow, acting superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, told NY1 that the governor was “very forward-looking a year ago now,” ahead of the current news cycle about frontier models.
“This isn’t just an enforcement mechanism,” she said of the law. “This is creating a safety framework where we’re ideally stopping the bad thing from happening.”
An Australian case shows the gaps
How much those thresholds leave uncovered became clearer this week. The Australian government learned that OpenAI failed to disclose a wayward AI hacking incident for over a month, news that landed as the company’s CEO and other AI leaders reiterated promises of responsible use to the United Nations General Assembly. Veronica Irwin, an AI senior policy reporter at Transformer, said the episode likely would not trip New York’s reporting requirements.
“I’m not sure that would be captured by RAISE because people did not die and there was not catastrophic financial damages,” she said. Still, she called the law a step forward.
“At least standardizing the level at which they have to be transparent is progress.” New York’s law does offer more rulemaking power, and Irwin expects the state to keep moving. “With AI, you’ve seen states racing ahead of Congress. I think New York will probably continue to do so,” she said, pointing to the new Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity, and Trust.
That office cannot pass bills on its own — that takes the New York State Assembly — but Irwin said it could lay the groundwork for other regulatory proposals.
Blakeman’s counterargument
Blakeman is making his case on economics. At a press conference in Queens on Sept. 23, he called Hochul’s one-year data center ban bad for business. “Every country is in a race to get these data centers up,” he said.
“What I would’ve done is put the people who had concerns about data centers in the room with the data center developers and work out those issues.” The proposal does let pro-data center localities request millions of dollars from the companies for community investments, though questions remain about how that would work. Blakeman has also been using AI in many of his campaign ads, which sparked a complaint.
Hochul enters the fight with a head start. She points to past work creating a multi-million dollar research consortium and a panel studying the industry’s job impacts. The jobs question is where the policy gets personal for younger New Yorkers.
Eli Dvorkin, policy director at the Center for an Urban Future, described the dynamic bluntly. “It’s not a mass jobs extinction event, but it is the hollowing out of the entry level leading to a situation where young people in the state can’t get on the path to a good job,” he said.
Researchers say government needs a strong workforce development plan to address that, even as entry-level postings for jobs requiring AI skills show bright spots. What to watch next: whether the new state office converts its rulemaking power into fresh proposals, and whether the data center moratorium becomes a defining campaign issue before voters weigh in.
