New York State Legislature passes RAISE Act frontier-AI safety bill

The New York State Senate and Assembly both passed the Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act on the same day, sending the bipartisan bill — sponsored by Senator Andrew Gounardes and Assemblymember Alex Bores — toward the governor’s desk. The Senate vote was 58 to 1. As passed, the bill would require the developers of the largest AI models to publish written safety and security protocols, test for the potential to cause “critical harm,” and disclose serious safety incidents to the state attorney general, who would be empowered to bring civil enforcement action for violations.

The bill’s proponents framed it as filling a gap left by the collapse of comparable federal legislation and by California’s veto of SB 1047 the previous year, arguing that a state as central to the AI industry’s talent and capital as New York could set meaningful transparency requirements even without Congress acting. Because it targeted developer conduct rather than deployment in New York specifically, the bill would, like California’s equivalent law, function in practice as a de facto national standard for any company doing business in the state.

Passage by the legislature was not final enactment: New York’s legislative calendar meant the bill needed Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature to become law, and unlike California’s SB 1047, which Governor Newsom vetoed outright, the RAISE Act sat awaiting action for over six months while the governor’s office negotiated amendments with legislators. Hochul eventually signed the bill in December 2025, alongside an agreement to narrow its scope and align its thresholds more closely with California’s transparency law, making New York the second state to enact statutory frontier-AI transparency requirements.