Gov. Hochul should kill Albanys toxic AI bill and let Congress set the industrys rules

Even though Congress has punted (for now) on any national rules to regulate Artificial Intelligence development, Gov.Kathy Hochul should still veto the bill now on her desk for New York-only regulation.America is absolutely guaranteed to lose the race with China to set the global standards for AI if US developers have to cope with 50 different sets of contradictory regulation — and the nation would pay a huge long-term economic price for that loss.Hochul herself flagged that point months ago on Bloomberg TV: “People prefer to have a federal regulation,” as “it’s hard when one state has a set of rules, another state does, another state.

I don’t think that’s a model for inspiring innovation.”Beyond that, the bill passed by New York legislators, The Responsible Artificial Intelligence Safety and Education (RAISE) Act, contains some terrible provisions designed to boost trial lawyers, not cutting-edge tech.How’s that?China is zipping ahead on AI, thanks in part to the ability of labs like DeepSeek to make the source code of their large language models freely available to anyone.US companies want to make their designs open-source, allowing others to build on their tech so American software can become the global standard.But the ambulance chasers want to be able to sue one tech company for sky-high damages over how another programmer uses (abuses) such open-source code; that’s tantamount to banning US open-source work — even though US lawyers will have no ability to suck the blood out of China’s open-source innovators.

Similar innovation-crushing provisions are already part of the Transparency in Frontier AI Act that California passed last month; having New York second the trend is beyond ominous.Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.

By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.Never miss a story.

At the very least, it’s going to p...