On Friday, a coalition of over one hundred and fifty concerned parents came together to deliver a formally written appeal to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, pressing her to approve the Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act in its current form, without any amendments or revisions. This coordinated outreach, representing the collective voice of families worried about the unchecked expansion of artificial intelligence in education and daily life, aims to ensure that the legislation maintains its integrity and intended safeguards. The RAISE Act, currently the subject of considerable discussion within both political and technological circles, represents a pioneering approach to establishing responsible governance in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Under its provisions, the developers behind large-scale AI systems — including influential industry leaders such as Meta, OpenAI, Deepseek, and Google — would be legally obligated to prepare comprehensive safety plans, ensure robust oversight mechanisms, and adhere to detailed transparency requirements concerning the documentation and public reporting of any safety-related incidents.

This significant piece of legislation successfully passed both chambers of the New York State Legislature — the Senate and the Assembly — during the month of June, reflecting broad institutional support for enhanced AI accountability. However, in the weeks following that approval, reports emerged that Governor Hochul proposed an extensive rewrite of the bill, nearly replacing its core content. The suggested changes, according to critics, would make the law substantially more advantageous to large technology corporations and would diminish some of the stronger consumer protection measures that had won bipartisan praise earlier in the process. This development has drawn comparisons to California’s legislative experience with its SB 53 initiative, which underwent substantial modification after major AI companies expressed discontent and sought to influence the final language to serve their interests.

Several major technology firms have voiced opposition to the RAISE Act, arguing that the compliance demands would be too cumbersome or impractical. The AI Alliance — a consortium that includes prominent companies such as Meta, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Snowflake, Uber, AMD, Databricks, and Hugging Face — issued a pointed letter to New York lawmakers in June. In that correspondence, the Alliance articulated what it described as its “deep concern” about the proposed regulatory framework, characterizing the bill as “unworkable” and incompatible with the speed and scale of current technological innovation. Meanwhile, a politically influential organization known as Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC supported by backers such as Perplexity AI, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, has launched targeted advertising campaigns against New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores, one of the RAISE Act’s co-sponsors, in an effort to dissuade further support for the legislation.

The open letter addressed to Governor Hochul was jointly organized by two advocacy groups deeply involved in promoting ethical technology and consumer protection: ParentsTogether Action and the Tech Oversight Project. In their appeal, these organizations presented the collective position of families alarmed by the potential dangers of unregulated AI systems. The letter included particularly poignant testimony, noting that some of the signees had personally “lost children to the harms of AI chatbots and social media,” underscoring the real and emotional consequences of inadequate oversight. The signatories described the RAISE Act in its current state not as a sweeping regulatory burden but rather as establishing “minimalist guardrails” — essential, baseline protections that should not only be preserved but enacted into law without delay.

The parents also clarified that the legislation does not intend to stifle innovation across the entire spectrum of artificial intelligence development. Instead, the bill deliberately focuses on the largest and most resource-rich entities, those investing hundreds of millions of dollars annually into AI research and deployment. These leading corporations would face specific obligations: they must report major safety incidents to the New York Attorney General, make their safety plans publicly available, and refrain from releasing any frontier AI model if its deployment could reasonably result in catastrophic harm. That risk threshold is explicitly defined as the potential for death or serious injury to one hundred or more individuals, or material damage exceeding one billion dollars in value — a sum tied to harm affecting life, property, or civil rights. This provision also extends to AI systems capable of acting autonomously, without meaningful human oversight, in ways that, if performed by a human being, would constitute serious criminal offenses, such as those related to the development of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.

In a particularly charged section of their message, the parents drew attention to what they characterized as a familiar and troubling pattern: the well-funded resistance of major technology companies to even modest regulatory efforts. Their letter declared, “Big Tech’s deep-pocketed opposition to these basic protections looks familiar because we have seen this pattern of avoidance and evasion before.” Through this statement, the authors invoked the historical parallels between current debates over AI and the earlier failures to restrain algorithm-driven social media platforms. They asserted that the consequences of those earlier lapses are now evident in the widespread harm to younger generations — including serious mental health challenges, emotional instability, social withdrawal, and difficulty focusing or performing in school environments. These outcomes, the letter argued, were not accidents but foreseeable results of a corporate ecosystem that prioritized rapid growth, engagement metrics, and profit over transparency, accountability, and social responsibility. In urging Governor Hochul to enact the RAISE Act without dilution, the parents framed their call to action as both a moral imperative and a necessary response to the mounting evidence of technological harm unleashed by unregulated innovation.

Sourse: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/844062/parents-call-for-new-york-governor-to-sign-landmark-ai-safety-bill