New York State Just Put Itself on a Legal Collision Course with Trump’s AI Policy

On Friday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed something called the Responsible AI Safety and Education (RISE) Act, which aims, on the one hand, to establish AI safety regimes, and, on the other hand, to troll Silicon Valley Republicans like Marc Andreessen, who are trying to dictate tech policy during the second Trump administration.

This comes just days after President Trump sent an executive order that prevents states from regulating AI.

According to the new state law, AI companies with annual revenues over $500 million must draft, publish and follow a formal set of security procedures aimed at preventing “serious harm” and report security issues within 72 hours or face a fine, making it stricter than California’s SB 53, which gives companies 15 days to report security issues.

About a week earlier on December 11, Trump’s executive order “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence” framed AI as a federal priority and outlined something called an “AI Litigation Task Force” at the Justice Department. According to the Attorney General, this task force will apparently have the task of challenging state AI laws that are determined to violate the federal program on AI (doing basically nothing).

Tying state laws into law is still a frustrating prospect even if the executive order lacks a strong legal basis, but New York State has quickly reached that position with this legislation.

In an explainer published Friday for Axios, legal experts who spoke to Maria Curie and Ashley Gold said Trump’s executive order relies on a strange reading of parts of the Constitution, such as the dormant commerce clause, which is generally understood as an effort to prevent states from writing self-dealing laws that are unfair to other states — not laws that are merely meant to fill a legal void left by the federal government.