According to The Verge, a group of more than 150 parents sent a letter on Friday, December 6th, to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, urging her to sign the Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act. The bill, which passed the State Senate and Assembly in June, would require major AI developers like Meta, OpenAI, and Google to create safety plans and report large-scale safety incidents to the state’s attorney general. It specifically targets companies spending hundreds of millions annually, prohibiting them from releasing a frontier model if it creates an “unreasonable risk” of causing death or serious injury to 100+ people or over $1 billion in damages. However, Governor Hochul has reportedly proposed a near-total rewrite of the bill to make it more favorable to tech companies, mirroring changes seen in California’s similar legislation after industry lobbying.
The Industry Playbook Is Clear
Look, this is a classic tech policy dance we’ve seen before. A bill gets traction, then the well-funded opposition swoops in. The AI Alliance—with members like Meta, IBM, and Intel—called the original RAISE Act “unworkable.” And the pro-AI super PAC, Leading the Future, backed by heavyweights from Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir, is already running attack ads against the bill’s co-sponsor. Their strategy? Frame any meaningful oversight as innovation-killing bureaucracy. It’s the same playbook used against social media regulation for years. And honestly, it often works.
Why Parents Are The Wild Card
Here’s the thing: the parent angle changes the political calculus. The letter, organized by ParentsTogether Action and the Tech Oversight Project, isn’t just abstract policy talk. It states some signees have “lost children to the harms of AI chatbots and social media.” That’s a powerful, emotional counter-narrative to the tech lobby’s economic arguments. They’re framing the current bill as “minimalist guardrails”—basically, the bare minimum. This puts Hochul in a tough spot. Does she side with a unified tech industry and its potential for job creation, or with a vocal group of parents framing this as a child safety issue? It’s a brutal choice.
The Stakes Of A Rewrite
So what’s actually in the original RAISE Act? The thresholds are incredibly high. We’re talking about preventing AI that could lead to 100+ deaths or help create a WMD. This isn’t about regulating a chatbot that gives bad homework advice. The parents’ letter nails it when they say the opposition looks familiar—it’s the “pattern of avoidance and evasion” from the social media era. The governor’s proposed rewrite, as reported elsewhere, seems aimed at diluting these core obligations. The big question is whether “safety” gets redefined into something so narrow it’s meaningless.
A Bellwether For AI Policy
This New York fight isn’t just a local issue. It’s a bellwether. If a major, tech-adjacent state like New York waters down its signature AI safety bill under industry pressure, it signals to every other state legislature what’s possible. The tech giants want a predictable, preferably lax, regulatory landscape. A patchwork of strong state laws is their nightmare. I think that’s why the lobbying is so intense. They want to set a precedent here. Will they succeed again? Or has the political environment—fueled by genuine parental fear and clearer understanding of tech’s downsides—finally shifted enough to get some real guardrails in place? The next few weeks in Albany will tell us a lot.
