New York mayor Zohran Mamdani used a Monday night appearance at Webster Hall to argue that AI’s arrival in daily life is a political choice rather than a technical certainty.
The event was The People’s AI Assembly, hosted by the AI Now Institute. Mamdani took questions from actor Ilana Glazer before an audience of New Yorkers, and his message was that residents should push back on the assumption that job losses, classroom tools and automated decisions are simply happening to them.
Cities filling a federal gap
The subtext was Washington. With federal regulation stalled, municipal governments have become the venues where AI rules actually get written, and Mamdani has been using that space.
Last month he ordered a ban on AI use in elementary and middle schools. Over the summer his office introduced a policy requiring landlords, brokers and listing platforms to disclose when property photos or videos are AI-generated, aimed at what the mayor’s office called house-phishing.
Glazer, a parent, pressed the schooling question from a different angle, asking why a technology that was absent from classrooms two years ago now arrives as a default.
City-level rules have limits. They cover local institutions and local commerce, not model development, and a mayor cannot govern a lab in another state.
What they can do is set precedent. Procurement terms, disclosure requirements and school bans spread between cities faster than federal rules move, and vendors tend to build to the strictest market they sell into.
