MILES PARKS, HOST:
On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order meant to stop states from strictly regulating the artificial intelligence industry. And while the order will almost certainly end up in court, its target is a growing patchwork of state legislation trying to set rules for this rapidly changing technology. One of the most prominent rulemaking efforts is in New York state. Alex Bores is a member of the New York State Assembly. He sponsored that state's AI regulation bill, and he's also a candidate for a House of Representatives seat that represents part of Manhattan. We talked with Assemblyman Bores about the president's executive order, which says it only wants to target onerous and excessive state laws. I asked him whether his bill fits that category.
ALEX BORES: Absolutely not - in New York, we passed the RAISE Act, which was largely based on voluntary commitments that all the companies had already made and pledged to do. We were just ensuring that those rules stayed in law and that they couldn't backslide from it. So I don't think it's onerous to require companies to do the things that they're already saying they're going to do. And I would note that the executive order just encourages the attorney general to sue over these laws for being onerous and violating federal law. But nothing was stopping the attorney general from doing that before or indeed from any private citizen or any company from doing that before. And yet none had. So no one seemed to think it was onerous before. It seems Trump is more sending a political message than one that is based on the content of the laws.
PARKS: Can you lay out a little bit more exactly the requirements that your bill would put into place?
BORES: So the RAISE Act, I should note, is in active negotiation with the governor to get a final version, so this might change. But as was passed and as it stands, there were really three major provisions of it. One requires that all of the advanced AI developers - we're really talking about maybe five companies, maybe seven companies, but the ones who are really at the frontier - publish a safety plan that they actually stick to, that they disclose critical safety incidents. So if something goes wrong that massively increases risk to New Yorkers, they have to actually tell the New York state government - and that lastly, if their models fail their own tests, that they can't release them. And that's really designed to get at what we saw with the tobacco companies where they were the first to know that cigarettes caused cancer but denied it publicly and kept releasing their products. We're saying, you know, these companies very much are the experts often, but if they're seeing extreme risk, they need to take action on that.
PARKS: So the Trump administration seems worried that this sort of patchwork of state laws, state regulations could potentially kind of set America back in the country's ability to compete in this sector. I wonder if you're worried about that at all - that, you know, even if a law like this is for the best in the short term for people's safety, that it could have real economic consequences down the road.
BORES: I agree in principle that if you got to a place with 50 different state standards and no federal one, that theoretically that could hamstring development, but that's not what we have. We have one existing transparency standard from California. New York has the only pending real safety standard. And if you're worried about a patchwork of states, there's a simple solution, which is the federal government should pass a law and should be the national standard. In fact, that's part of my platform in running for Congress. What they shouldn't do is say, we can't get our act together to pass one law, so we're going to stop anyone else from taking action to protect their citizens.
PARKS: That's New York State Assembly member, Alex Bores. Thanks for talking with us.
BORES: Thanks for having me.
PARKS: And we reached out to the White House for comment on this story, but we did not get a response before the interview aired.
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