AI 2025 → 2026 Live Show | Part 2

**Amar** (0:00)
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**Erik Torenberg** (0:32)
Next up, we have New York State Assemblymember, Alex Boris, future.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:38)
You're getting just a little ahead of yourself with congressman there.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:42)
Future congressman, hopefully. And he is a computer engineer by training. He was a Palantir for four years. I'm definitely glad that we have engineers now entering public service, which hopefully will at least make our leadership cohort younger and more tech-savvy. He is also the author of the RAISE Act, which is now, I think, the president is trying to preempt with his executive order. So there's lots to talk about. Alex, great to have you on the show.

**Alex Boris** (1:17)
So glad to be here.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:19)
Cool. So welcome. First question, you sponsored the RAISE Act. We did a whole Cognitive Revolution episode about it some months ago. It has, at the time, it honestly didn't seem like it was going to be a super controversial whitening rod sort of thing. It seemed like it was less than SB 1047 was. That has not necessarily held over the intervening months. Where are we? I know there's been sort of, let's say, an edit to the bill from the governor. Now we have an EO that sort of targets bills like this. Then we also have super PACs that are coming online to target people like you for bringing these bills forward in the first place. But just for starters, where are we in the life cycle of the RAISE Act?

**Alex Boris** (2:04)
You've hit all of the major ingredients. The main aspect is that we're in active negotiations with the governor right now. New York has a fairly unique process called Chapter Amendments where after the legislature passes a bill, the governor can negotiate with the sponsors of the bill for changes that she would like to see. And if we reach an agreement, she signs the original bill but attaches a memo that says I'm signing pursuant to this agreement that we've reached. And then we the sponsors will introduce all of the amendments early in the next session. About a third of the bills that get signed in New York, it varies year to year, but roughly a third of the bills end up going through this chapter amendment process. We always knew raise would be a part of that. And so we're actively in that process now. The governor, or I should say the bill was delivered to the governor last week. And the Constitution gives her 10 days excluding Sundays to sign. So that means she has until Saturday to sign it or veto it. Although the message that we're getting is they're trying to shut everything down by Friday night so people can actually have some holidays.
So in the next 48 hours or so, we should know if we have agreement on a revised version of the Raise Act or if unfortunately we don't.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:19)
And what are the kind of key outstanding points of negotiation right now?

**Alex Boris** (3:24)
There's a lot. And I don't want to get too into sort of conversations that are happening because you want people to have the freedom to express, hey, what if we tried this? What if we tried that? So I have to say somewhat above the specific details, but there's been a lot of reporting this week that there's a lot of pressure to move to something that more matches SB 53 versus what was initially in raise. You know, curiously, there hasn't been a push to match the European code of practice. So it seems like it's less about maybe standardizing everything that has to be done versus weakening it. But the point that I keep making is that there's no company that would be subject to, if we were to pass the exact same bill as SB 53 There's no company that would be subject to it in New York that isn't already subject to it in California. So it's not like passing a data privacy bill where each state that passes it, you give new rights to the citizens of your state. If you just reaffirm the exact same bill, you haven't changed anything. It's like being the 39th state to ratify an amendment to the Constitution, right? 38th is enough. It's in the Constitution. The 39th, it doesn't make practical changes. And so we're having real conversations about SB 53 was always meant to be the floor. Are there steps we can take that advance AI safety that we can all agree on? Or are we destined, unfortunately, to have to try again next year?