New York's Mamdani says an AI takeover is not inevitable and urges residents to push back

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the actor and activist Ilana Glazer spoke about artificial intelligence at Webster Hall in Manhattan on Monday night, with Glazer questioning the mayor about how the technology will shape work, schools and public life. The event, called the People's AI Assembly, was hosted by the AI Now Institute, a think tank that studies the social implications of AI.

The conversation ranged from jobs to children's education to ordinary dignity. Mamdani did not dwell on model benchmarks or industrial competition; he kept returning to a narrower question: whether the public gets a say when AI arrives in classrooms, in curricula and in the housing market.

He argued that the technology's rapid rollout is not inevitable and that public officials should hold AI companies accountable. He urged New Yorkers to resist the feeling that AI is inevitably coming for their jobs, their children's minds and their dignity, and to take back control instead.

That posture has already produced city policy. According to TechCrunch, Mamdani ordered a ban last month on AI use in elementary and middle schools. Over the summer he also introduced a policy requiring landlords, brokers and real estate platforms to disclose clearly when listing photos or videos are AI-generated, an effort to stop renters from being "house-phished" by misleading listings.

"Nothing has to be," Mamdani said at Monday's event. "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 the current period as a "reckless adoption of technology without any kind of a reckoning with the limitations of that technology."

He then cited a far grimmer example: the U.S. military's February strike on a school in Iran, which killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. Officials involved in the Pentagon's internal investigation told Bloomberg that overreliance on AI in targeting was one factor in the attack, according to TechCrunch.

Mamdani also went after the industry's own defense of itself. There is a habit, he said, of speaking about AI as if it were infallible and beyond question, as if only the people building it could regulate it, and he noted that Facebook made similar arguments back in 2008. What that amounts to, he said, is "an attempt to escape any kind of accountability at any level, without also jeopardizing the potential valuation from an IPO" — a pointed reference at a moment when Anthropic is expected to debut on public markets this year and OpenAI has said it will go public in 2027.

At the federal level, he criticized what he called a "complete abdication of federal law." National conversations about AI, he said, are so often framed as an arms race with China that humanistic concerns get pushed aside in the language of competition. He pointed to the Superintelligence Task Force announced earlier this month, which largely focuses on letting powerful AI companies self-regulate rather than creating new federal restrictions.

What to watch next is whether the city-first approach travels. Mamdani said that in thinking about what comes after this federal administration, there has to be a very different framework for how AI is understood, discussed and held to account. Whether New York's school ban and disclosure rules become a template for other cities, and how AI companies respond to municipal pressure, remain open questions.