New York RAISE Act: Responsible AI Safety and Education Act

Summary

The RAISE (Responsible AI Safety and Education) Act, S6953-B/A6453-B, signed by Governor Hochul on December 19, 2025 and effective January 1, 2027, adds Article 44-B (§§ 1420-1425) to the New York General Business Law. It is the second US state frontier-model safety law and a direct peer to California's SB 53, built on a disclosure-and-incident-reporting design. It binds 'large developers' (§ 1420(9)) — those that have trained at least one 'frontier model' (§ 1420(6): a model trained using more than 10^26 computational operations at a compute cost above $100 million, or knowledge-distilled from one above $5 million) and have spent over $100 million in aggregate training compute. Before deploying a frontier model a large developer must implement and conspicuously publish (with appropriate redactions) a written safety and security protocol and transmit it to the Attorney General (§ 1421(1)); in the S6953-B floor text was barred from deploying a model that creates an unreasonable risk of 'critical harm' (§ 1421(2) — a prohibition STRUCK by the chapter amendment enacted Mar. 27, 2026; see below), with § 1420(7) defining critical harm as the death of or serious injury to 100 or more people, or at least $1 billion in damage, caused via chemical/biological/radiological/nuclear weapons or model conduct with no meaningful human intervention; and must disclose 'safety incidents' (§ 1420(13): autonomous model behaviour, theft of or unauthorized access to model weights, control failures) within 72 hours (§ 1421(4)). The Attorney General enforces. IMPORTANT — the version signed on December 19, 2025 was modified by chapter amendments and differs from the S6953-B floor text: post-signing analyses (DLA Piper, Carnegie Endowment, Morrison Foerster, Hunton) report that the floor text's whistleblower protection was struck, civil penalties were reduced to up to $1 million for a first violation and $3 million for subsequent violations (from $10M/$30M), and the effective date was set to January 1, 2027; that reconciling chapter amendment (S8828 / A9449, introduced January 2026) was signed by Governor Hochul on March 27, 2026; per post-enactment analyses (Morrison Foerster, Davis Wright Tremaine, Wiley) it REMOVED the § 1421(2) deployment prohibition — reorienting the Act to a transparency-and-reporting regime (mandatory published safety-and-security protocols plus 72-hour critical-safety-incident reporting) rather than a deployment ban — and aligned the statute more closely with California's SB 53; the effective date is January 1, 2027. This entry tracks the enacted chapter-amended law at reduced confidence; the catastrophic_risk classification accordingly rests on the retained safety-protocol + incident-reporting duties, not the struck deployment prohibition.

At a glance

Adopted

2025-12-19

Effective

2027-01-01

Status

adopted not in force

Primary source

N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law art. 44-B, §§ 1420-1425 (Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, S6953-B / A6453-B, signed Dec. 19, 2025; eff. Jan. 1, 2027)

Source URL

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S6953