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New York state lawmakers passed a bill <\/a>on Thursday that aims to prevent frontier AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic from contributing to disaster scenarios, including the death or injury of more than 100 people, or more than $1 billion in damages.<\/p>\n The passage of the RAISE Act represents a win for the AI safety movement, which has lost ground in recent years<\/a> as Silicon Valley and the Trump administration have prioritized speed and innovation. Safety advocates including Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and AI research pioneer Yoshua Bengio have championed the RAISE Act. Should it become law, the bill would establish America\u2019s first set of legally mandated transparency standards for frontier AI labs.<\/p>\n The RAISE Act has some of the same provisions and goals as California\u2019s controversial AI safety bill, SB 1047, <\/a>which was ultimately vetoed<\/a>. However, the co-sponsor of the bill, New York state Senator Andrew Gounardes, told TechCrunch in an interview that he deliberately designed the RAISE Act such that it doesn\u2019t chill innovation among startups or academic researchers \u2014 a common criticism of SB 1047.<\/p>\n \u201cThe window to put in place guardrails is rapidly shrinking given how fast this technology is evolving,\u201d said Senator Gounardes. \u201cThe people that know [AI] the best say that these risks are incredibly likely [\u2026] That\u2019s alarming.\u201d<\/p>\n The RAISE Act is now headed for New York Governor Kathy Hochul\u2019s desk, where she could either sign the bill into law, send it back for amendments, or veto it altogether.<\/p>\n If signed into law, New York\u2019s AI safety bill would require the world\u2019s largest AI labs to publish thorough safety and security reports on their frontier AI models. The bill also requires AI labs to report safety incidents, such as concerning AI model behavior or bad actors stealing an AI model, should they happen. If tech companies fail to live up to these standards, the RAISE Act empowers New York\u2019s attorney general to bring civil penalties of up to $30 million.<\/p>\n The RAISE Act aims to narrowly regulate the world\u2019s largest companies \u2014 whether they\u2019re based in California (like OpenAI and Google) or China (like DeepSeek and Alibaba). The bill\u2019s transparency requirements apply to companies whose AI models were trained using more than $100 million in computing resources (seemingly, more than any AI model available today), and are being made available to New York residents.<\/p>\n While similar to SB 1047 in some ways, the RAISE Act was designed to address criticisms of previous AI safety bills, according to Nathan Calvin, the vice president of State Affairs and general counsel at Encode, who worked on this bill and SB 1047. Notably, the RAISE Act does not require AI model developers to include a \u201ckill switch\u201d on their models, nor does it hold companies that post-train frontier AI models accountable for critical harms.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Silicon Valley has pushed back significantly on New York\u2019s AI safety bill, New York state Assemblymember and co-sponsor of the RAISE Act Alex Bores told TechCrunch. Bores called the industry resistance unsurprising, but claimed that the RAISE Act would not limit innovation of tech companies in any way.<\/p>\n \u201cThe NY RAISE Act is yet another stupid, stupid state level AI bill that will only hurt the US at a time when our adversaries are racing ahead,\u201d said Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anjney Midha in a Friday post on X<\/a>. Andreessen Horowitz and startup incubator Y Combinator were some of the fiercest opponents to SB 1047.<\/p>\n