Maloney asks about the RAISE Act's enforcement teeth

Thank you, Chair, and thank you all for being here.

A special welcome to my state colleagues who also represent the constituents of District 4, Assemblymember Alex Perez and State Senator Gonzalez, who was here before.

And I also want to thank you for your work in Albany to pass the RAISE Act.

Because of you, New York was the first in the nation to pass a frontier AI safety bill that went into law.

But I wanted to ask about the process.

The original bill had penalties of $10 million up to $30 million.

And the final version is looking more like $1 million to $3 million.

These companies are able to spend millions of dollars training models.

What teeth does this bill actually have now as law?

And can you speak to why those fines were reduced?

Open to anyone who'd like to comment.

Those fines were reduced because the companies insisted that they would be paying similar fines in every municipality and every state because obviously every state municipality would pass a copycat law.

The fact that here we are and there are three states that have passed such a law suggests that they significantly underestimated their own lobbying power, but also I think gives credence to the effort of what you are doing here at TEDx.

today of holding them accountable and that multiple municipalities and jurisdictions should do that.

One to three million dollars is nothing for these companies, absolutely nothing.

It's about what they are going to pay just to register in New York to the digit office that will be regulating them.

Depending on the number of companies that qualify, it'll be one to two million dollars.

So that is not an amount that provides an incentive strong enough to change behavior.

Maybe private rights of action, maybe whistleblower protections, maybe requiring outside audits, maybe a lot of the things that this council is considering will, but certainly a million to three million won't.

I'll just add to that.

I totally agree with what a submember Boris said.

The one, I think, novel thing about the digit office that we created as part of the RAISE Act is that we empowered the state regulator to not only receive the safety reports and the safety plans of these companies and to

assess the validity and the legitimacy of those reports, but also we empower them to propose and study the issue of continuing improvement to our AI safety laws

so that we develop the expertise over time about how we can make our laws like the RAISE Act stronger.

So today, that function does not do anything currently, but it is our hope and our expectation that as the RAISE Act is implemented,

As the changes to this technology become more evident, we develop a deeper state-based, you know, as an administrative state expertise

in this field to be able to propose far-reaching and ambitious guardrails for the next iteration and the next iteration after that and not have to rely.

on, as we did early on, hearing from companies about what they could or could not do and not have sufficient, for lack of a better word, firepower behind us to always be able to answer back in a way that would be able to win over our critics.

And so the digital office in the future should have this ability to play a much larger role than it currently does.

And I certainly look forward to seeing that come to fruition as we see the law be further implemented.