Mamdani Says Washington Has Walked Away From AI

New York City's mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has accused the federal government of abandoning its responsibility to oversee artificial intelligence, and he wants state leaders to fill the gap. Speaking this week, Mamdani described Washington's approach as a complete abdication and called on New Yorkers to press Governor Kathy Hochul to act, according to TechCrunch.

The immediate target of his support is the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a bill the New York legislature passed in June. It would impose a one-year moratorium on building or switching on data centres rated at 20 megawatts or larger, the power-hungry facilities that train and run modern AI models. The bill cleared the state Senate and Assembly by wide margins but has not yet been signed into law.

Hochul has moved on the issue, though not as far as some lawmakers want. She enacted a narrower pause by executive order in the summer covering the largest sites, and Democratic legislators have been pushing her to sign the broader bill with its longer moratorium. Mamdani's intervention adds a prominent voice to that campaign.

A widening state-federal split

His argument lands in the middle of a genuine divide over who should regulate AI. At the end of 2025, the Trump administration signed an executive order aimed at stopping states from writing their own AI rules, after Congress declined to pass a national framework. Since then the fight has shifted toward the states, with proposals built around liability, transparency and tighter siting rules for the physical infrastructure.

Mamdani went further than the data-centre question. He said the federal government should also slow the pace at which AI itself is being developed, a position that puts him among the more cautious voices in city and state politics rather than the accelerationist camp that dominates much of the industry.

Data centres have become the flashpoint because their costs are visible and local. Residents near new sites have raised concerns about water use, as they did over Google's $15 billion project in India, and about electricity, with the buildout already showing up on household power bills. For a mayor, those are not abstract policy debates. They are the kind of thing constituents notice when the bill arrives.

Whether Hochul signs the full moratorium remains the open question. For now, Mamdani has made clear which side of it he is on.