New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is urging residents to reject the idea that AI’s spread is inevitable, backing that call with a school ban and a proposed disclosure requirement for AI-made property images. His message: New Yorkers should have a say in how the technology affects their jobs, their children’s minds, and their dignity.
Speaking with activist and “Broad City” star Ilana Glazer at Webster Hall in Manhattan on Monday night, Mamdani argued that public officials should hold AI companies accountable rather than simply accept their rapid rollout. Glazer questioned the mayor about AI’s future in society at The People’s AI Assembly, hosted by the AI Now Institute, a think tank focused on the technology’s social implications.
“Nothing has to be,” Mamdani said. “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.”
His administration’s local measures put that argument into practice. Last month, Mamdani ordered a ban on AI use in elementary and middle schools. Glazer, who is a parent, described feeling unsettled by the technology’s arrival in classrooms.
“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.
Over the summer, Mamdani also introduced a policy that would require landlords, brokers, and real estate platforms to clearly disclose when property listing photos or videos are made with AI. The aim is to prevent New Yorkers from being “house-phished”, or deceived by misleading listings. Together, the school ban and housing proposal challenge the assumption that schools and the public must accept AI wherever it appears.
Those targeted city measures sit alongside a broader demand for national accountability. With the federal government doing little to regulate AI, cities are being left to act on their own. Mamdani criticized what he called the “complete abdication of federal law” on the technology.
“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 emphasizes allowing powerful AI companies to self-regulate rather than introducing new federal restrictions. That approach comes amid growing fears about AI’s effects across human life, including warnings from whistleblowers at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI that the technology could lead to human extinction.
Mamdani also pointed to a concrete example of what he described as the “reckless adoption of technology without any kind of a reckoning with the limitations of that technology”: the U.S. military’s February strike on a school in Iran. The attack 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.
For Mamdani, the accountability problem also involves who gets to write the rules. “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,” he said, comparing that position with arguments Facebook made in 2008.
He characterized those arguments as an attempt to escape accountability at every level without jeopardizing a potential IPO valuation. Anthropic is expected to debut on public markets this year, while OpenAI has said it will go public in 2027.
The unresolved question is how far school restrictions and housing disclosures can go without the wider federal framework Mamdani wants. His call extends beyond the current administration: “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,” he said.
