Mamdani Says Feds Have Abdicated on AI, Urges New Yorkers to Push Back

By Marcus Bennett

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told a Manhattan audience on Monday night that the federal government has engaged in a "complete abdication of federal law" on artificial intelligence, and he called on New Yorkers to reject the idea that the technology's rapid arrival in schools, housing, and daily life is inevitable.

Mamdani spoke at The People's AI Assembly, an event hosted by the AI Now Institute, a think tank that examines the social implications of AI. Actress and activist Ilana Glazer, known for "Broad City," posed questions to the mayor on stage at Webster Hall. The setting was a public conversation, but the stakes were policy: with Washington doing little to regulate AI, cities are now the most active regulatory actors in the United States.

The mayor's argument was blunt. The technology's spread is a matter of choices, not destiny, and public officials should hold AI companies accountable for those choices.

What has Mamdani actually done on AI?

Two concrete city actions anchor the mayor's position, and he cited both as evidence that local governments can push back.

Last month, Mamdani ordered a ban on AI use in New York City elementary and middle schools. The move directly challenges the assumption that classrooms must absorb the technology simply because vendors have built it.

Over the summer, he introduced a disclosure policy for housing. The rule would require landlords, brokers, and real estate platforms to clearly disclose when a property's listing photos or videos are generated with AI. Its purpose is to protect New Yorkers from being "house-phished" — tricked by misleading listings into pursuing apartments that do not match reality.

Both measures are narrow. Both are first-of-their-kind in scope for a major American city. Together they frame a governing philosophy: adoption is not consent.

Glazer, who is a parent, said the arrival of AI 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.

That remark captures the political opening Mamdani is positioning himself within. Public unease about AI in daily life is growing faster than federal rules governing it, and the mayor is converting that unease into municipal policy.

Why does the mayor say "nothing has to be"?

The core of Mamdani's Monday argument was a rejection of technological inevitability — the framing that AI must be accepted because it is already here.

"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 described a "reckless adoption of technology without any kind of a reckoning with the limitations of that technology," and pointed to the most lethal example available: 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. The number of children killed — at least 123 — is the sharpest figure in the mayor's case, and it connects an abstract debate about algorithmic reliability to a documented body count.

Who does Mamdani say is escaping accountability?

Mamdani argued that AI companies cultivate an image of infallibility to deflect oversight, and he traced the playbook to an earlier tech era.

"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."

The financial context gives that quote its edge. Anthropic is expected to debut on the public markets this year. OpenAI has said it will go public in 2027. Mamdani's claim is that regulatory immunity and IPO valuations are linked: companies arguing that only their own engineers can regulate them are, in his framing, also protecting their market debuts.

What is the federal government doing instead?

The mayor's critique of Washington is specific. He 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 approach stands in tension with the warnings coming from inside the industry itself: whistleblowers at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI have warned that AI could lead to human extinction.

The gap is the story. Extinction-level warnings on one side, self-regulation on the other, and a regulatory vacuum in between that cities such as New York are now filling on their own.

What comes after this administration?

Mamdani closed with a forward-looking argument about the policy framework that should follow the current federal approach.

"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.

The immediate testing ground is New York City. A school AI ban is in force. A housing disclosure policy is in motion. Both will measure whether municipal governments can discipline AI deployment in the absence of federal law — and whether other cities follow the model Mamdani is building while Washington waits.