Alex Bores

It was an honor to speak at the Mothers Against Media Addiction Fall Benefit on Tuesday. @wearemama.bsky.social is doing essential work to keep children safe from dangerous tech.

Three related but distinct concepts keep being combined around federal & state AI regulation/preemption. Conflict clause: federal law trumps state law where they directly conflict. This doesn't need to be written into law; it always applies.

Anti-democracy clauses: Congress bans states from enforcing any (new) laws in a certain area. Should be a red line. There are VERY few cases where this makes sense.

Three related but distinct concepts keep being combined around federal & state AI regulation/preemption. Conflict clause: federal law trumps state law where they directly conflict. This doesn't need to be written into law; it always applies.

Override clause: federal law explicitly overrides some related state laws. This is often appropriate: states are the laboratories of democracy, and as we learn which policies work we can take them national.

The pace of AI development is unprecedented. But could it move even faster? There’s good reason to believe it will. As AI is used more often to accelerate its own development, we could see exponential growth.

Anthropic is pitching a bill that closely matches its framework from June. How can you watch Hugging Face, Coxon, & rogue AI swarms, and conclude that the bill you cooked up in June is sufficient? This comes nowhere close to the speed of developments nor the speed we need to keep people safe.

But even if you would accept some, Anthropic's June framework says, "Congress should not preempt state law unless it enacts a rigorous federal regime that meets or exceeds the strongest measures proposed in this framework."

Anthropic is pitching a bill that closely matches its framework from June. How can you watch Hugging Face, Coxon, & rogue AI swarms, and conclude that the bill you cooked up in June is sufficient? This comes nowhere close to the speed of developments nor the speed we need to keep people safe.

The AI industry wants us to think we have to focus on one risk at a time. But the American people have multiple concerns that are all related: Jobs, safety for kids, privacy and security, accountability, and more.

A couple of big factors changed the conversation around AI risk in the past few months. Security incidents and warnings from former industry employees showed everyone how urgent and serious this issue is.

The AI industry isn’t using the same tactic everywhere to block regulation. Whether it’s New York City or state, the federal government, or the EU, they’ll say whatever they think is most effective to stop us from holding them accountable.

OpenAI might say that they’re done spending hundreds of millions on elections to block regulation - but we shouldn’t take them at their word on this. We need politicians in both parties to disavow this spending, and we need to keep putting pressure on OpenAI to follow their promise.

During my campaign for Congress, the AI industry declared me their number one target in the country because I called for regulation of AI. I’m proud of the campaign we ran and the movement we’ve built together — and we’re not backing down.

Through @whodecidesai.bsky.social, we’re building on the momentum we’ve seen all around the country. Americans are concerned about AI safety, jobs, kids, accountability, and countless other issues around AI.

It’s often easier to talk about problems than solutions. Here are four concrete things we can do to regulate AI: 1. Require AI companies to disclose safety incidents 2. Require monitoring to be turned on for all deployments 3. Require data retention 4. Verify chips are in authorized locations

At UNESCO's Digital Learning Week in Paris, I spoke about the challenges and trade-offs when writing AI safety legislation. If your bill is too specific and focused, it could be out of date by the time it becomes a law.

Can AI be taught ethical behavior to help regulate its own actions, or will it always ignore boundaries to achieve its tasks? This is not an easy question to answer, but one thing is certain: we’re not ready to answer it yet.

I’m proud to have led the charge on AI legislation here in New York, along with so many great partners. It certainly hasn’t been easy: the AI industry poured millions of dollars into our state to try and block any real progress against AI safety risks.

By Election Day in 2028, our goal is that AI safety is a unifying issue in the Democratic Party, rather than a dividing one.