Two of New York's most prominent figures, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and activist and "Broad City" actress Ilana Glazer, took the stage at Manhattan's Webster Hall on Monday night to discuss artificial intelligence, with Glazer interviewing the mayor about what AI means for society going forward. Mamdani urged New Yorkers not to surrender to the feeling that AI will inevitably take their jobs, harm their children's minds, and strip them of their dignity—and to reclaim agency instead. His remarks landed at a time when Washington is largely absent from AI regulation, leaving cities to forge their own paths.

Speaking at The People's AI Assembly, an event organized by the AI Now Institute—a think tank focused on the social consequences of AI—Mamdani contended that the technology's swift deployment is not a foregone conclusion and that elected officials have a duty to hold AI companies responsible. Last month, Mamdani issued an order banning AI in elementary and middle schools. Glazer, who is a parent, described feeling uneasy about AI entering classrooms. "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.

During the summer, the mayor also rolled out a policy requiring landlords, brokers, and real estate platforms to explicitly disclose when listing photos or videos are generated with AI. The measure is designed to shield New Yorkers from being "house-phished"—deceived by misleading property listings. Both initiatives push back against the notion that schools and the public must simply accept AI as it arrives. "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 pointed to what he called a "reckless adoption of technology without any kind of a reckoning with the limitations of that technology," referencing 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. "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."

Anthropic is expected to debut on the public markets this year, and OpenAI has said it will go public in 2027. Mamdani criticized the "complete abdication of federal law" when it comes to AI. "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 comes despite growing fears about AI's effect on every facet of human life, including warnings from whistleblowers at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI that AI could lead to human extinction. "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.