“Nothing has to be”: New York mayor Zohran Mamdani tells citizens to fight back against the AI doom and gloom

• October 20, 2026

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani has urged New Yorkers to push back against AI
• He says there has been a ‘complete abdication of federal law’ when it comes to regulating the technology
• Mamdani has banned AI use in some schools in New York and has banned AI from being used to generate images on property listings

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has urged city residents to push back against the doom and gloom feelings around AI, telling them that “Nothing has to be.”

Speaking at The People’s AI Assembly, hosted by the AI Now Institute in Webster Hall, Manhattan, Mamdani noted there has been a “reckless adoption of technology without any kind of a reckoning with the limitations of that technology.”

“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,” Mamdani said.

“Reckless adoption of technology”

Federal regulations on AI are few and far between, and are failing to keep pace with the technology, prompting widespread worry that AI will replace jobs and harm education for both New Yorkers and people around the world.

Mamdani’s comment centers around how AI technology is being relentlessly pushed into products, services, education, and elsewhere with people having very little say in how it is used.

Schools were a particular sticking point for the conversation on AI. Mamdani recently introduced a ban on AI use in elementary and middle schools after the technology began creeping its way into classrooms. Actress and activist Ilana Glazer, interviewing Mamdani, said, “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?”

AI is also having an impact on schools in other ways. Speaking on the reckless adoption of AI, Mamdani referenced the US military’s use of an AI targeting tool that was involved in a strike on a school in Iran earlier this year that killed over 150 people including at least 123 children. A subsequent Pentagon investigation found that overreliance on AI tools was a factor in the deadly strike.

President Trump has pushed forward with an AI at any cost rhetoric framed as an arms race against China, with the President arguing that any attempts to regulate AI could cost the US its lead. “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.

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

Anthropic is set to enter the public markets before the end of 2026, with OpenAI looking to make the same move in 2027. Both companies have been involved in hacking incidents where AI agents undergoing testing have escaped sandboxes and breached other companies. These incidents have been labelled as ‘rogue’ behavior, despite evidence from investigations suggesting the AI agents were behaving exactly as intended.

The use of the word ‘rogue’ has also been questioned by experts, with Tenable Field CTO Bernard Montel saying the use of the word “muddies the public policy debate by distracting regulators from enforcing strict legal liability for flawed software deployments.”

Despite these events, little movement has been made to introduce regulations, which Mamdani labelled as a “complete abdication of federal law.”

“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,” he said.

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