Mamdani Tells New Yorkers AI Is Not Inevitable — and Cities Must Act Alone

By Olivia Hart

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has ordered a ban on AI use in the city's elementary and middle schools — and on Monday night he told New Yorkers the technology's rapid rollout is anything but inevitable. Speaking at The People's AI Assembly, an event hosted by the AI Now Institute, a think tank focused on the social implications of AI, Mamdani argued that the federal government has all but quit the field and that public officials must hold AI companies accountable themselves.

The venue was Webster Hall in Manhattan. The interlocutor was Ilana Glazer, the activist and "Broad City" star, who questioned the mayor about AI's future in society. Glazer, a parent, said the technology'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?" she said.

That question has no technical answer. It has a commercial one — which is precisely Mamdani's argument.

What has Mamdani actually done?

Two concrete policies anchor the mayor's posture.

• Last month, he ordered a ban on AI use in elementary and middle schools across New York City.
• Over the summer, he introduced a policy requiring landlords, brokers, and real estate platforms to clearly disclose when a property's listing photos or videos are made with AI.

The disclosure rule targets "house-phishing" — buyers and renters tricked by misleading, AI-generated listings. Both measures challenge the assumption that schools and the public must simply accept AI as it arrives.

A school ban and a listing-disclosure rule are modest instruments against a trillion-dollar industry. But they are also more than most U.S. cities have put on paper.

What did the mayor say about inevitability?

Mamdani's core claim on Monday was rhetorical as much as regulatory: the feeling that AI must be accepted is manufactured.

"Nothing has to be," Mamdani said at the event Monday. "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."

He described a "reckless adoption of technology without any kind of a reckoning with the limitations of that technology," and cited a specific case: the U.S. military's February strike on a school in Iran that 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.

That example is doing heavy lifting — one military strike does not characterize a commercial technology sector. But it serves Mamdani's broader point about immunity from scrutiny.

"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," Mamdani said, noting that Facebook made similar arguments back in 2008.

"What it really is," he continued, "is an attempt to escape any kind of accountability at any level, without also jeopardizing the potential valuation from an IPO."

The timing gives that quote teeth. Anthropic is expected to debut on the public markets this year, and OpenAI has said it will go public in 2027.

What is Washington doing instead?

Mamdani criticized what he called the "complete abdication of federal law" on AI. His framing: national policy treats the technology as a geopolitical contest, with human costs discounted.

"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 focuses on allowing powerful AI companies to self-regulate rather than creating new federal restrictions. That approach persists despite warnings from whistleblowers at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI that AI could lead to human extinction.

Self-regulation plus extinction warnings is an unusual policy pairing. The task force's design suggests the market, not regulators, will set the boundaries.

What comes next?

Mamdani positioned his city-level moves as a bridge to a different federal framework once the current administration ends.

"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," Mamdani said.

What he did not specify: enforcement mechanisms for the school ban, penalties for nondisclosure in real estate listings, or any city budget line for AI oversight. Municipal authority over national AI developers is limited, and Mamdani offered no plan that would change that arithmetic. For now, New York is regulating at the edges — classrooms and apartment listings — while Washington holds the levers it has chosen not to pull.