Governor Hochul Speaks at Axios AI + NY Summit

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul participated in Axios AI+ NY Summit fireside chat with Ina Fried.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Ina Fried, Axios: Next up, we are joined by a governor who's putting AI front and center of her tech policy agenda. Please welcome New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Thanks so much. First off, I think we're both big sports fans, although I think yours are more concentrated in Buffalo than my teams.

Governor Hochul: I love all my New York teams. All the ones that play in New York in particular.

Ina Fried, Axios: We have a very lively crowd.

Governor Hochul: We can annex the Meadowlands and bring them back home for anybody's paying attention. I think I'm going to run on that.

Ina Fried, Axios: We just have to annex the Meadowlands.

Governor Hochul: Trump can take Canada. I should at least be able to get the Meadowlands right.

Ina Fried, Axios: You focused a lot on bringing high tech jobs to New York, not just AI but CHIPS. I think there was another announcement today, Global Foundries is going to increase its investment by another $3 billion. Talk about those efforts, but also in the context of what's coming with AI. I mean, if the predictions are right, we had the Anthropic founder, Dario Amodei, saying, this could be half of jobs over a few years. Is it enough to just have incentives to bring high tech jobs here? If generative AI eliminates this many jobs, is even retraining feasible? Like what do we really need?

Governor Hochul: No, it's all in the realm of possibility. I want New York to be the home of innovation. We always have that. All the great inventions, all the technological revolutions that proceed. IBM is home here. Micron will soon find its way here, and that's 50,000 jobs in upstate New York. I'm from Buffalo, as you may have figured out from the first question. That's a lot. That's for an economy that you see based on manufacturing and building. And my dad and grandpa were steelworkers and now my dad left a steel plant and started a tech company back in the sixties.

So I'm hardwired to be part of an economy that's devoted to risk. The people are willing to go out there and do something that's quite unprecedented, but also the returns are very high. So I want New York to be that place that people look to as they already are. I mean, we have over 2,000 AI startups right now, but your question is, will these new jobs of manufacturing semiconductors, for example, and others, will that replace the jobs that can be lost?

It does not have to be that way. AI can increase productivity dramatically. So why can't we harness that to be the most productive nation on the planet — that we can have more output and use human capital in the ways that have not been harnessed before? Because people are too busy working on an assembly line in the past. Let's take that talent and refocus it on innovation.

We have a workforce, for example, of over 188,000. I have a plan to train 100,000 New York State employees. Train them in the uses of AI, how it can supplement us, how we can be more responsive to the public. I'm not looking to eliminate their jobs. I want them to have a better — have people have a better customer experience when they come into a DMV or other offices.

So I see great potential here, and I leaned hard into this. We will talk about Empire AI I presume, but this is something that's so natural. I'm very competitive. I'm proud that New York City is now the number one destination for new tech jobs. I mean, that's us. I won't name any other cities or what coast they're on.

Ina Fried, Axios: Before I came here, I left a few AI companies in San Francisco to come here.

Governor Hochul: Anybody not a New Yorker here? I'm just pointing it out. This is the smartest people on the planet. They're here and they're saying they're New Yorkers. So, just an observation.

Ina Fried, Axios: Obviously as a sports fan, it's hard to beat home field advantage. So jobs is obviously one big piece of this, but another is making sure that society is ready to adapt and use it safely. I want to broaden out, but one place to start — we had a conversation with Aura, which is a startup that's working on, how do we make this safe for kids and families? And obviously that's something you've also been focused on.

How do you see the role of AI in education? You've had some bills around phone use, around deep fakes among students. How do we make sure that kids are learning the technology they need to be learning, but also protected from chatbots that might increase addiction and that sort of thing. What else do we need?

Governor Hochul: No. New York State is nation-leading when it comes to protecting our children — and I can go into the details because we enacted these last year against a lot of opposition.

But I said to the big tech companies that were saying, “Well, we were able to kill this in some other states. We plan on killing it in New York.” I said, “Why don't you get out of the courtroom and come into my conference room and we'll talk about this.” There is a path forward, but I know all of you have kids.

And I'm sure you want someone to be looking out for them. Well, I'm New York State's first Mom Governor, and I look out for all the kids. So that's where I approach this from is what we can do to protect our children, but not unnecessarily constrained what AI is all about and the potential.

So we did this, but I'll tell you what's most concerning is what Washington did — their House Republicans just did a few days ago — and if this gets through the Senate, it says that no state or municipality can regulate any form of artificial intelligence for the next decade.

So that means my ban on sexual exploitation of young girls on social media and using AI and the fact that there are these AI undressing sites. In the first half of 2024, there were 16 sites that had 200 million views. I mean, this is what's going on to our kids, our girls sitting in high schools, and we have to stop that.

And so I have a whole list of reforms — I encourage every other state to undertake it because right now I am not holding my breath that Washington will have the courage to stand up and do what's right, which really should be a nationwide policy to protect our children. We'll keep at it. And I'm concerned. We'll see the Trump administration in court, once again, because — and this is a real growth industry for lawyers, right? I'm getting sued, I'm suing them, and I'm a lawyer too, I’d probably make more money on the other side, but I like what I do.

Ina Fried, Axios: So what I hear from the tech companies all the time is, “Oh, we're fine with regulation, we just don't want a patchwork of regulation. We don't want different regulations in 50 states.” Are they being genuine when they say that or do they just not want regulation?

Governor Hochul: Well, then here's what we'll do. We'll let you work with New York State as we did. We'll be the gold standard. I was just with a room full of crypto leaders yesterday. I said, “You want to do virtual currency in New York because we'll have the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. We always do things to make sure it's protecting our citizens, our consumers, our viewers, and we'll always have the highest standards. So come join us, and then you can create it here with us and other states can replicate it. So I'm happy to do that.

As a former member of Congress — really happy I'm not there right now — I know that this is really Washington's responsibility, because it's hard for companies to have a different policy they have to adhere to in 50 different states. That is not ideal.

Ina Fried, Axios: So if we don't want 50 regulations and Congress seemingly is not gonna do anything, could you work with other states?

Governor Hochul: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Ina Fried, Axios: Is there efforts already in that regard there?

Governor Hochul: Yeah, there's a democratic governor's organization that is more forward thinking in this space, and we do work together, we share ideas. But our legislation is just one-year-old now, and I'm sure they want to see the — our law is one-year-old, the regulations are following, so there's a little bit of work to do. But that's exactly what we do, we share best practices.

Ina Fried, Axios: So as we've alluded to, there's a bunch of individual policies in place in New York, laws that have passed around things like kids' privacy, deepfake porn. One thing New York doesn't have is a real comprehensive statewide privacy law, similar to Washington and some other states. Does New York need a privacy bill?

Governor Hochul: We're looking at that as well. What we focused on primarily were kids right off the bat, and even with respect to social media algorithms, we are the first state in the nation to ban social media companies from bombarding our kids with algorithms throughout the day, and really many times taking them to a dark place. I mean, if a young person is contemplating suicide and they put in “suicide” and it comes back with — not resources and support and uplifting messages to make them think differently, it tells them how to commit suicide. So when we have triggering words like that that show up, we have our police alerted to that and others who are alerted to this.

So this is what we're focusing on, how to send out the warning signals of what can be done. But privacy is very important to us as well. We'll get to that, I just need to take care of the kids first.

Ina Fried, Axios: And on that front, you mentioned social media. That's obviously been a huge concern for a long time is the impact that's having on our kids. It seems like the next thing down the road is AI companions, where they're not talking to a real person, but they're talking to an AI companion. What should that relationship — should kids not be talking to AI companions at all?

Governor Hochul: We have in our law, and I don't know that other states have done this, that there has to be some warning or indication over and over that this is not a real person. This is not a real person. We have that in our laws now. We did that already just to give that young person just a reality check.

And I can't stop the whole phenomenon from happening, but the stories that have been coming out, not just the 14-year-old in Florida who committed suicide, but the New York Times did quite a story about all the different relationships. And adults can make their own decisions, kids are very impressionable, and those are the ones that we have to take the extra measure to protect.

And we should not get any opposition from these companies at all. I mean, tell them it's bad for your image to be standing up against a mom and protecting kids. I mean, just don't even go there. It's just not worth the fight.

Ina Fried, Axios: So every now and then, folks who have been coming to this conference for a while know, I very occasionally give out a magic wand and allow someone to— if you could wave this magic wand and have the ideal regulation in place, what would it look like? So I'm going to let you borrow — you can't keep it — borrow my magic wand.

If you could wave your wand and have some ideal legislation in place around how AI can be embraced safely, what would be part of that package?

Governor Hochul: Part of that would be that there's a lot of education of people. People do not understand this gap between virtual reality and reality, and I'm afraid that's something that a lot of kids are falling into.

So, I would want to make sure that all your personal information is protected. What we did last year was our Child Protection Act — you cannot sell data collected on kids, anyone under 18; you cannot amass this data based on their preferences, where they're going — you can no longer send algorithms to them; you can no longer sell that to other people. I think that's something adults are entitled to as well. Those are some of the privacy protections. You can't be capturing all this personal data and monetizing it. So that's an area I think we should be focused more on and get some cooperation from the companies.

Ina Fried, Axios: I know you leave a bunch of the court battles to your very active Attorney General — I get emails from her on a practically daily basis of what she's challenging the White House on. What are the things that have happened in the first few months of the Trump administration that have you personally most concerned? What are the fights that you want more people to take up?

Governor Hochul: You do not have enough time.

Ina Fried, Axios: We got three minutes.

Governor Hochul: God. I mean, my latest fight was to save offshore wind. They literally, on April 16, pulled the plug on a 10 year, $5 billion project from a company called Equinor from Norway, which will be powering 500,000 homes in Brooklyn with renewable energy. That is a big win for our climate, our renewable energy efforts, and to meet our climate goals. On April 16, the Secretary of Interior gave them a stop work order. The project was going to be stopped a few weeks ago. They're losing $50 million a week.

I went down to the White House; I had long conversations; I had more phone calls; and I'm proud to say we saved not just renewable energy, but 1,500 clean energy jobs in the process. So, that's the most recent. They're attacking congestion pricing every single month on the 21st — I get, basically, a hostage letter that if you don't turn off the cameras, we're going to kidnap you or whatever it is and I usually take it, and do a social media of it, and throw it away — here we go.

So we're fighting on that, but also on other areas about my rights to — we just had a win in court on that, where they're threatening to withhold federal dollars. Anytime they don't like something you do, whether it's the State of Maine — my friend Janet Mills was subjected to this; we were together in the White House when she got harassed — they threatened withholding federal dollars. We just got a temporary restraining order from them threatening to withhold our federal dollars when it came. So that's — I can't keep it all straight.

We litigated birthright citizenship. We're going to have a lot of complicated challenges with the immigration issue. I have to testify before the House Oversight Committee on that very issue next week — really looking forward to that. You see who's on that committee? Check it out. And, by the way, it's someone who said, “I didn't even read the bill. No, it's a thousand pages.” Use ChatGPT to figure it out — right?

They're claiming they did not know that there was a 10 year ban on any social media. I mean, I'm sorry, any AI.

Ina Fried, Axios: AI.

Governor Hochul: “Oh, I didn't know.” You voted for it. Just ask GPT. Anything I should worry about in here?

Ina Fried, Axios: All right. I would love to keep the —

Governor Hochul: Just some humble advice for them.

I would love to keep the conversation going. Unfortunately, I know you have somewhere to go and we're almost out of time. I have a quick question that I think only you can answer. So, I love buffalo sauce, but I don't really like the bones.

Ina Fried, Axios: Do boneless wings count?

Governor Hocul: There's chicken fingers.

Ina Fried, Axios: That's what my 12-year-old likes.

Governor Hocul: Okay, chicken fingers are close enough, no one will mock you out, but the damning thing — if you ever eat chicken wings with ranch dressing, you'll be barred from the entire region. Just don't go. Just —

Ina Fried, Axios: All right.

Governor Hocul: Take it from me, everybody. That's your pro-tip today. All right, so you heard it here: the Meadowlands is now part of New York, boneless wings are okay, but don't you dare put them in ranch.

Ina Fried, Axios: Thank you so much, Governor Hochul.

Governor Hocul: Thank you.