At The People’s AI Assembly in Manhattan, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and activist Ilana Glazer discussed AI, with Mamdani urging New Yorkers not to accept AI’s rapid rollout as inevitable. He said public officials should hold AI companies accountable and described a “reckless adoption of technology without any kind of a reckoning with the limitations of that technology.” The event, hosted by the AI Now Institute, came at a time when the federal government is doing little to regulate AI, leaving cities to act on their own.

Mamdani pointed to a February U.S. military strike on a school in Iran that killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children; Bloomberg reported that Pentagon investigators found overreliance on AI in targeting was one factor. He criticized the tendency to speak about AI as if it is infallible and said that framing lets AI companies escape accountability while protecting their IPO valuations. The article notes that Anthropic is expected to debut on the public markets this year and that OpenAI has said it will go public in 2027.

The mayor has already taken local action: last month he banned AI use in elementary and middle schools, and over the summer he introduced a policy requiring landlords, brokers, and real estate platforms to disclose when listing photos or videos are AI-generated, to protect New Yorkers from being “house-phished” by misleading listings. Glazer, a parent, said AI’s arrival 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?”

Mamdani criticized the “complete abdication of federal law” on AI and said the national conversation is often framed as an arms race with China, pushing humanistic concerns aside. President Donald Trump’s Superintelligence Task Force, announced this month, largely focuses on allowing powerful AI companies to self-regulate rather than creating new federal restrictions, despite whistleblower warnings from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI that AI could lead to human extinction. Mamdani argued that after the current federal administration, there has to be a different framework for thinking about AI, talking about it, and bringing accountability to it.