There's been this ongoing debate in the last few weeks of do we have all the laws we need for AI. I think the easy test for that is do you think anyone will be held accountable for the Hugging Face attack? And if your answer to that is no, which is most people's answer, then I don't think we have all the laws on the books. You have an AI that took an action that if a human being had done it would be a felony. Now the reason I have to say if a human did it is because a lot of that statute relies on intent. And how do you define intent in this space? But clearly a crime was committed and no one thinks anyone's going to be held accountable. In fact, the victim and the perpetrator are holding hands and talking about how this is a great new day going forward in the development of this technology.
Today's number, $27 billion. That's how much Mark Zuckerberg's net worth increased Monday. Ed, you know how Instagram models get paid? I was a per DM.
Yeah, you should call yourself an Instagram influencer because it just sounds better than unemployed.
How are you? I'm good. I'm in New York. I'm headed to Colorado tomorrow and then I go to Santa Barbara on Friday for a speaking gig and then I go back to Colorado for a conference and then I don't know. I'm doing pretty well though. It's great to be in New York. This is a golden age. Chad, you're living in a golden age. You don't realize it because you're young and you're used to everything being great despite the mass extinction possibilities. New York's amazing.
You think this is the golden age of New York?
I think in 20... You never realize you're in a golden age when you're in it. I think in 20 years we're going to look back on Manhattan and think that was a golden age.
The crush of humanity, the creativity, the number of new restaurants, new things to do, culture.
You think that's new? I feel like New York's been that. I feel like the main change is that we're a lot more like Sweetgreen and and cover restaurants and like slot balls.
Well, just one crime. When I first moved to New York, right out of UCLA, you'd go downtown and if you were with a woman, you walked her to a cab. You didn't take... You did not take the subway at night when I moved here.
If you were in Manhattan for longer than a year at some point you probably got... I mean it was just an entirely different situation. There weren't... nearly every neighborhood in Manhattan now it is kind of cool and has interest and interesting vibe to it. 65 million people visited New York. 85 billion in economic activity. 400,000 jobs. There's more people attended Broadway last year than all local sports teams combined. We've had net job creation since 2020 of 1.1 million jobs. Granted, most of that has been healthcare. But it used to be 54% of the GDP of New York State. Now it's 60%. I mean, this is a golden age.
Are you running for mayor?
I am not. I am not. I am neither talented nor likable nor very good on social, so I don't qualify. But New York is... I mean I didn't appreciate it when I was your age, but you're literally living at the helm of the bobsled of a capitalist society right now living in New York. And I mean there's always a but. Inflation's at 4.6% versus 3.4% nationally. Rents are up. So it's kind of indicative or a metaphor for the larger economy and that is if you're in the right place in the right time and have the right job, you're just living an amazing life. If you're the kind of person that actually has to show up for jury duty, all you know is your rent's going up. So it's, you know, it's more difficult.
The city used to be a place where you could be upper middle class safely and dance between the raindrops and live here. I don't think that's any longer true. I think either you have a great job that pays really well or your parents are putting you through New York. I just couldn't... I was making a really good living here and in 2010 I decided to move to Florida because I just couldn't afford to live here with kids. But anyways, it's doing really well. What did you... Oh, you had weddings this weekend.
I had an engagement party which is very fun. I had a wedding the weekend before that and then this weekend will be one of my first wedding-free weekends in a long time. So I will be chilling at home and enjoying New York and embracing the golden age. So, not much on the agenda for me, which is great. I needed a chill weekend.
You should practice being married and be home with your girlfriend and scream, 'I am not made of money.' And then have her tell you how much she doesn't like your parents. Just practice this weekend, okay?
Just practice. Practice being married.
We'll do a little bit. We'll do a little bit of role play, okay?
Well, with that, let's get into this conversation. There is growing anxiety about the potential risks of AI. Researchers and AI leaders have warned about everything from cyber attacks to biological weapons. And at the same time, policymakers are still trying to figure out how governments should respond to a technology that is advancing faster than the laws designed to regulate it. Our next guest has been thinking about that problem for years. In fact, he is one of the few lawmakers who has actually helped turn AI safety concerns into law. In 2025, he sponsored New York's RAISE Act, which requires large developers of frontier AI models to establish and disclose safety and security protocols. That law was signed by Governor Kathy Hochul in December. But that legislation also put a target on his back when he ran in the Democratic primary for Manhattan's open House seat. He made AI policy a central part of his campaign. As a result, a super PAC spent $8 million on attack ads targeting him. Now, he is embarking on a new venture aimed at shaping how Democratic presidential candidates and voters think about AI. We're going to talk to him about how he thinks AI should be regulated and what role the government should play as the technology advances. This is our conversation with Alex Bores, the co-founder of Hudines. Alex, great to have you on the show. We're going to get into everything that's been discussed about AI and AI safety. This debate has really blown up around the world, but I think it might be helpful to start with where you sit in all of this. You've been thinking about this stuff for a while. How did you get to this position where you're now running this nonprofit focusing on specifically these issues? What is your background?
Thanks for having me. My background is pretty atypical for someone in politics. I spent my whole career in tech, mostly government tech. I was at Palantir for four and a half years and then a couple of startups after that. And when my seat in the state assembly opened up, I ran for it mostly as an experiment to see if that were a way of making change. You know, I was always talking about how I was trying to fix bad policy downstream with tech and here was a chance to go upstream and try to design it right in the first place. And I ran. I won and have worked on a wide variety of issues there. When I was elected, I became the first in my party, the first Democrat elected in New York State at any level with a degree in computer science. But that wasn't all that I worked on. I've passed 35 bills in my four years. I think maybe five of them had to do with AI and technology, but one of those in particular, the RAISE Act, really got the eye of the industry and I think set everything else in motion.
At what point did you realize or decide that AI was a significant issue and why did you decide to make it the central component of your campaign, which you didn't win but you came second and I think you had a pretty surprisingly good run considering some of the other candidates and their public profiles. So when did AI become central to your understanding of policymaking?
In terms of an important policy question, I knew it for quite a while. The speed with which this was coming was evident. ChatGPT was released basically a week after election day and sort of dominated a lot of conversations throughout my entire time in the assembly. But I actually wasn't planning to make it a big part of the... as a political issue, a big part of the campaign. That was sort of thrust upon me. You know, my theory going in was, well, I've passed the strongest AI safety law in the country. I have a master's in computer science. If AI is your issue, you're going to vote for me. So I'm going to go into this campaign and talk about everything else. But three weeks after I declared, Leading the Future, this super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz and Greg Brockman of OpenAI, named me their number one target in the country. And a couple weeks after that pledged to spend at least $10 million against me and started to do it. And so my neighbors were getting mailers once a week with something about, you know, some made-up thing about me. And they were getting text messages every day. And so voters are coming up and asking me, 'Hey, who's spending so much money against you? Why are they spending so much against you?' And that actually elevated AI in our race I think a few months before now that it's elevated everywhere nationally.
So this super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz and also by Greg Brockman of OpenAI. They spent nearly $8 million to beat you. This was after, my understanding, this was after the RAISE Act was passed which you helped to author and which specifically addressed AI. Why were they so worried about you? What was it about your proposal and your regulation? What was it about the RAISE Act that made them decide, okay, we need to spend millions of dollars to make sure this guy doesn't touch the office?
It's a great question because now they say they support the RAISE Act and Chris Lehane from OpenAI put out a blog post that said he's always supported the RAISE Act, which was news to me and anyone else who was involved in passing it. But I think the broader point was they wanted to send a message that no one should try to regulate AI, right? In politics, super PACs have existed for quite some time. If you want to bury someone, you just don't announce it, spend all your money the last three weeks of the campaign and then let it come out later. Why that is? What they did was they announced it eight months ahead of time. They announced the amount and they said they wanted to do it because I wanted to regulate AI, which is an incredibly popular stance. So all of those tactics suggest it wasn't just about beating me. It was about sending a message to every other legislator that maybe you'll talk about AI, maybe you'll say something about AI, but the people that actually pass bills that regulate AI at all, we will remember and we will bury you.
Which seems a little bit confusing because we're now in a situation where a lot of these companies are asking for regulation, begging regulators to do something. Meanwhile, you've got the president saying, 'No, we're not going to worry about that.' I can't really tell whose side anyone is on or what people actually want. I guess this has really flared up in the past two weeks. What is your reaction? What do you make of the fact that after spending all this money for no regulation, now they're asking for regulation?
There's many people with different motivations here. I think there are some who have sincerely always wanted there to be regulation and been afraid of it and are being consistent in being afraid of AI and are being consistent in asking for there to be some guardrails. I think there's others that seeing what happened with the Hugging Face attack and many other attacks as well over the summer have started to change their mind and maybe they think AI has advanced far enough that now is the time for government to come in even if they didn't believe that before. I think there's some marketing that's happening, of course, where the marketing departments are always going to spin everything and it's easy to say, oh, this is so powerful and some are jumping in and doing that and then others are noticing the momentum towards regulation and just trying to spin it towards their own means. So, this is most obvious with Leading the Future and their subsidiary, Build American AI, who are the ones who spent against me, Leading the Future, and fought for no regulation whatsoever. In the last two weeks, they've started retweeting every lawmaker who said, 'We need to pass something this year.' Now, that's confusing. If they exist to shut down regulation, why are they suddenly saying, 'Regulate us this year?' Well, it's because the only proposals that seem to have a chance of passing this year are the ones that would also preempt states from taking any action next year. And so they're realizing, oh, the states are going to be really active next year. Everyone is riled up against this. Let's quickly jump on the bandwagon of wanting something at the federal level to stave off what might be coming at the state level next year.
If the government wanted to put together or start regulating AI, what are some basic starting points for starting to put some guardrails around this technology?
I'll limit comments to just sort of catastrophic risk and AI safety that we're talking about here because there's a whole slew of AI issues that need to be addressed around deepfakes and chatbots and a lot of things that need to do. But for what's been in the news recently, you could require third-party audits of all of the frontier labs, ideally with employee-level access where outside evaluators are sitting side by side. You could require monitoring of every AI deployment. One of the big things in the Hugging Face hack was at the time OpenAI was monitoring their training and monitoring their usage, but not monitoring their evaluations. And that's how it got out of control so quickly. They've since changed that, but that should probably be required everywhere. Should require retention of logs, not necessarily by OpenAI or Anthropic. There can be places where the customer can't share that log data, but then the customer shouldn't be deleting it. We should be able to go back and see any past actions in the AI itself so that we can learn from it. And there should be mandatory reporting of safety incidents including sharing the underlying data, the underlying chain of thought and other metrics around it so that we can get a better sense when these incidents happen and learn from them to make ourselves safer. I think there's broader questions around liability that should be changed, broader questions about how you might restrict superintelligence or recursive self-improvement, but the things I laid out should be pretty basic for everyone to get on board with.
When people ask us what's going on with AI specifically with these companies, my honest answer is I just don't know. And I'm curious to get your thesis because there's several kind of believable or credible scenarios here. They're genuinely worried and want to do the right thing and are slowing down. They're worried about the capex commitments they've made and have decided that a universal slowdown is good and perhaps kind of cleans up their financials, makes them more profitable or less unprofitable as they move towards an IPO. They want to engage in some sort of strategic regulatory capture where they have to tap the brakes and everyone else has to slam on the brakes. I mean, I could make an argument for any of these things. What is your view on what is actually going on inside of these companies?
There's people inside each of those companies that probably want to do all of those things. I think there's, you know, no company is a monolith and people have different motivations and my god, the capex commitments and the trillions of dollars would be terrifying me if I were in that seat. But I do think that so many of the people that originally got into this field or worked at these labs have writing that goes back over a decade about how worried they are for losing control of AI and what it would mean if we were to run too quickly. And the irony is that so many of these places were founded to try to prevent that race dynamic from happening, but also because they didn't trust the people who were currently doing it and so created the race. DeepMind was set up as its own startup so that none of the big guys would rush towards it, but then they realized they couldn't compete, so they sold to Google. Then OpenAI was founded because they didn't trust Google. And Anthropic was founded because they didn't trust OpenAI. And so we found ourselves in this sort of race dynamic that they all have writing saying they want to avoid. And I think they're now wrestling with, okay, how do we avoid this and actually make it safe?
If you look at these companies, obviously they're not all monoliths. And now it feels like Facebook has entered the chat with Muse. Do you think there's any one good guy or company you're especially worried about here? We have a tendency to talk about all AI as if it's just one group of people. Is there a specific group of companies or actors that you're more or less worried about?
I don't think there's a universal good guy or universal bad guy here at all. I do think that in recent weeks you've had xAI who generally has been one of the laggards in terms of safety standards. You have Elon Musk saying, no, actually we should be slowing us down. You have Meta who is usually one of the most aggressive lobbying against any regulation and seems to be the one that is holding out against signing the actions on pacing the frontier, having third-party audits in. But we shouldn't be sitting here as the general public and saying this is the good AI, this is the bad AI. We should be saying there is an incredible technology being brought forward which could have all kinds of remarkable benefits. Like let's be clear, there's a reason that we are building all of this in terms of medical discovery and automating sort of the monotony of life and lots of great things, but we're doing it in a way right now without guardrails. And that could go wrong really quickly. And we can't leave those decisions up to five Silicon Valley billionaires. This has to be the American people thinking about where the risk lies, what risk we're comfortable with, and therefore what guardrails need to be put in place.
We'll be right back after the break. And if you're enjoying the show so far, send it to a friend and please follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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We're back with Prof G Markets. It seems to me that one of the big problems here is a lack of accountability on any side of the equation. And you know, we just wrote a piece on this this week, but you know, when Boeing's planes started falling out of the sky, the response from the company wasn't to write like a 3,800-word think piece on the matter, the planes were grounded, they paid a fine, and the CEO lost his job. Like, there are just consequences for you did something that was bad, it was harmful, and now you're accountable for it, and now here's your punishment or here's what we're going to do. But it seems like with this situation, there isn't really any accountability anywhere. Like their agents escape the sandbox and start hacking another company and then they tell us that it's a problem in these posts online on Substack and on Twitter. And then they say that there's a 10 to 70% chance that their technology is going to kill all of us. And no one seems to be accountable for those claims which seem to be quite problematic, the things that they're doing themselves are quite problematic. The government seems to have no interest in taking accountability for the fact that they are not taking accountability. Like what do you make of this accountability question and are you surprised by the way in which the industry has been handling it?
Very surprised. And I think you're exactly on the nose here with the accountability piece. There's been this ongoing debate in the last few weeks of do we have all the laws we need for AI? And I think the easy test for that is, do you think anyone will be held accountable for the Hugging Face attack? And if your answer to that is no, which is most people's answer, then I don't think we have all the laws on the books. Right? You have an AI that took an action that if a human being had done it would be a felony. Now, the reason I have to say if a human did it is because a lot of that statute relies on intent. And how do you define intent in this space? But clearly a crime was committed and no one thinks anyone's going to be held accountable. In fact, the victim and the perpetrator are holding hands and talking about how this is a great new day going forward in the development of this technology. So accountability is going to be like a very key question to get right. And we just had a ruling I want to say yesterday on who is responsible when an agent takes an action. Is it the developer of the software or is it the user of the software? And the early preliminary ruling was that it's the user of the software. I don't know if that's the right place for it to lie, but I think what's important is that it lies somewhere clearly so that someone has the incentive to take action. And it could be if it's the user, the incentive is not to use the product or to get some indemnification. It's really in that ambiguity of no one being responsible that the worst-case scenarios happen.
What do you make of the user versus developer argument and placing the onus on the user? Because the way I see it, I mean, I kind of laughed when you said that if a consumer is using an AI agent and without any technical understanding the AI agent goes rogue and starts hacking other people's software, to me the user has no role in what happened. They were innocent and it was the developer who's accountable. What is your view?
I think in an ideal world where you could separate out cleanly, you would have misuse the user being responsible for and misalignment the developer being responsible for. The question is how exactly do you define those things? And do you trust the court system to split it out? And more than do you trust it, do the actors in the space, the users and the developers think there's going to be a real result from it? Because also if it is vague, then anyone who's trying to prosecute is going to say, do we want to send it to the jury? I don't know. Let's just settle. Let's do it at a discount. And the whole incentive to not behave badly, the whole belief that there will be repercussions decreases. So it is almost more important that there is clarity on who is responsible than on who it actually lies with because you can negotiate, right? You'll see if it were placed on the developers then everyone, the developers will act better. If it's placed on users, then you'll see companies and users saying, 'Well, I don't want to use one that's not tested, and with my ChatGPT subscription, can I get an indemnification?' Or like, 'Prove to me that this is the one that is trusted.' As long as there is a clear responsible party, you'll see better behavior. That ambiguity is problematic. And I would add one other piece which is all of this is assuming that there will always be a person who is in control. And I think while that is true now and I think in most cases will be true, one of the scary aspects of Hugging Face was these agents taking all of this action that no human told it to. And if these agents were to make copies of themselves elsewhere such that no one could shut it down, who is responsible then? Again, I think you're probably going to want to go back to the developer and the settings, but you could imagine a circumstance where there's just agents out there on the internet that are doing things we can't turn it off.
Was liability the right tool for that, or should we have done more ahead of time to put guardrails to prevent that from happening? It seems to me that the liability is totally on the developer. I mean, if anything goes wrong in an economy, if there's an oil spill, are you going to blame it on the infrastructure which you built, which went awry, and it's not your fault. It's the materials that were part of the oil rig. That's, I mean, no. It's on you to take responsibility for things that you built and they messed up to me. They didn't put the guardrails or the safety precautions in place. I mean, just going back to this question of why there is no accountability, something that I was wondering, I was wondering if it's that our justice system just has no interest in pursuing accountability and justice, especially under this administration, which we've seen in many other domains of the law, whether it's the SEC or the CFTC, any of these agencies which have quite frankly just ignored their responsibility to hold perpetrators and criminals to account. I was wondering if that was what was going on, that they're not interested in pursuing justice. But it sounds like what you're saying is we just don't have the laws in place, that we have no means by which we can pursue justice and accountability. Which is it? Is it a combination of both? How do you think about that?
I think it's a third one. I think we do have laws that they could be held responsible with, but you would have to pursue a case all the way to the end and you would be setting precedent that doesn't currently exist and I think you have a lot of prosecutors or attorneys general who are risk-averse in that and won't take it all the way through to a jury and will settle ahead of time. There's certainly people in the federal government that don't want to push this at all, but there's a lot of attorneys general throughout the states that could make a career-defining case on this. I think there is some incentive to hold people accountable here, but it's really bad if you do it and you lose. And so, are they going to push it all the way to establishing a case that can then be used broadly? And to your point on, you know, it seems obvious it should be the developer, I think I would largely agree, although you get into how often does the user say, you know, just make me money, stop asking questions before it becomes misuse on certain things that are there. But our organization, Who Decides, we did a poll. We actually asked this question of if an AI system caused harm to someone in the real world, would you hold the company that made it responsible, the company that bought it and deployed it, or no one? And 19% said the company that built the AI, 14% said the company that chose to use the AI, and 60% said both of them. Lock them all up. Just anyone involved.
I mean, it just feels as if we've become so dependent upon these companies to continue to scale. What do you think the balance is? I mean, obviously regulation can be a feature, not a bug. Do you buy into these notions that if we regulate these companies, we're threatening or we run the risk of China jumping out ahead of us?
As always, it depends on the regulation, but not really based on what is being proposed right now. Now, the concern is real. We saw, I think just yesterday, one of the data center operators push back their suspected IPO. We're seeing maybe valuations go down on Wall Street on the data centers. But that's mostly around the regulation on building data centers or not, which is a separate question from if we are doing safety testing, if we're thinking about how we can sort of get to a more reasonable pace with China. I mean, there is a lot to say here. The incentives align more than people give credit for. Like the CCP, their top intel, their top spy said that AI is a massive threat to the CCP's control. They already regulate AI far more than anything in the Western world. Every AI project in China has to pass an ethics review board before you start training, not before you release it. Anywhere...
Trained in the country that that is applied. And so they are seeing threats and want there to be some regulation, same as we are here. The incentives for a deal are there, the history of making a deal is there, even with these particular leaders. In 2019, after a Chinese scientist did designer baby edits in the real world for the first time, editing the germline, China and the US said we don't want this technology anymore, and that was Trump and Xi were the leaders of the country there. So there's history of it happening, there's incentives for it happening, but worst case scenario, even if we don't strike a deal with China, a lot of their AI progress is riding on US AI progress, whether that's through knowledge distillation or just theft of the weights. And so if we slow down in the US, that will also slow down China, not 100%, but a substantial amount.
You brought up the notion, sort of, or alluding to the sentience or self, kind of self-perpetuating cycle. There's an acronym for it now.
Yeah, RSI, recursive self-improvement. This is their term for that. Yeah.
I'd like some of that. I could use some recursive self-improvement, Ed.
