Mamdani says feds have abdicated on AI, urges New Yorkers to push back

Two of New York’s sweethearts, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and activist and “Broad City” star Ilana Glazer, spoke about AI at Webster Hall in Manhattan on Monday night, with Glazer posing questions to the mayor about the future of AI in society.  

Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to resist the overwhelming feeling that AI is inevitably coming for their jobs, their kids’ minds, and their dignity, and to take back control instead. 

His message came at a moment when the federal government is doing little to regulate AI, leaving cities to act on their own. At The People’s AI Assembly, an event hosted by the AI Now Institute, a think tank that explores the social implications of AI, Mamdani argued that the technology’s rapid rollout is not inevitable and that public officials should hold AI companies accountable.

Last month, Mamdani ordered a ban on AI use in elementary and middle schools. Glazer, a parent, said the technology’s arrival in classrooms unsettles her.

“It just makes me nervous. It feels so non-consensual, as though…this has to be in schools. It wasn’t two years ago. Why does it have to be in schools?” she said.

Over the summer, the mayor also introduced a policy that would require landlords, brokers, and real estate platforms to clearly disclose when a property’s listing photos or videos are made with AI. The policy is aimed at protecting New Yorkers from getting “house-phished,” or tricked by misleading listings.

Both moves challenge the assumption that schools and the public must simply accept AI as it arrives.

“Nothing has to be,” Mamdani said at the event Monday. “There’s a creep that comes with this, and there’s an intent to overwhelm that leaves people feeling as if there is simply no option.”

He said there has been a “reckless adoption of technology without any kind of a reckoning with the limitations of that technology,” citing the U.S. military’s February strike on a school in Iran that killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. Officials involved in the Pentagon’s internal investigation have told Bloomberg that overreliance on AI in targeting was one factor in the attack.

“There is this desire to speak about [AI] as if it is infallible, as if it cannot be questioned, as if the only people who can regulate it are the ones who are currently developing it,” Mamdani said, noting that Facebook made similar arguments back in 2008. “What it really is,’ he continued, “is an attempt to escape any kind of accountability at any level, without also jeopardizing the potential valuation from an IPO.”

Anthropic is expected to debut on the public markets this year, and OpenAI has said it will go public in 2027. 

Mamdani criticized the “complete abdication of federal law” when it comes to AI. 

“At a national level, when the conversation is about artificial intelligence, it’s so often framed in this language of an arms race with China, and any of the humanistic concern, we just push to the side in a language of national competition,” the mayor said. 

President Donald Trump’s Superintelligence Task Force, announced earlier this month, largely focuses on allowing powerful AI companies to self-regulate, rather than creating new federal restrictions. That comes despite growing fears about AI’s effect on every facet of human life, including warnings from whistleblowers at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI that AI could lead to human extinction. 

“As we are looking at what comes after this federal administration, there has to be a very different kind of framework in how we think about AI, talk about AI, the accountability we’re willing to bring forward when it comes to that,” Mamdani said.