The young candidates shaking up the Dem Party

0:00Astead Herndon:You can argue that the New York congressional primaries are the most important primaries in all of the country. And that's not just because us New Yorkers think we're the center of the universe. The races that are happening here are highlighting issues that are sure to come up in next year's presidential primary on tech, on immigration, on policing. So today, let's talk to two candidates who races are sure to have national implications. One is about AI and how and if we should regulate this new technology. I think there's a lot of fear among elected officials that if they try to regulate this technology, it will be the end of their political career.

0:34Astead Herndon:The other is about generational change, representation, and just how far left is too far left. There was a lot of pressure to be woker than thou, right? And that has gotten us to a point where a lot of people groan or roll their eyes. Alex Boris of New York 12 and Daria Liza Avila-Chevalier of New York 13. That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig in.

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2:11Astead Herndon:Assemblyman Boris, thank you for joining us. We appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. Why do you think this race has national relevance or has relevance to anyone who doesn't live in New York 12? When I launched, I thought it would just be a race about New York 12, about the issues that were here. And three weeks later, on my wedding anniversary, so I remember the specific day, leading the future, a super PAC of Trump mega donors announced that they were going to make me their number one enemy and spend whatever it took to beat me. They wanted to make an example out of me. They chose to try to send a message to every member of Congress that the cost of having a say in how AI affects our kids' brains or our jobs or the environment, that cost has to be political destruction.

2:53And so this race has now become a test of that thesis as to whether we can stand up to this force.

2:59Astead Herndon:Yeah, I mean, and I wanted to ask why we think they decided to target you. Eight years ago, you were at Palantir Technologies, and now the AI industries, to your point, has kind of named you as a leading boogeyman in their races. How do we get from there to here? You passed the strongest AI safety law in the country. So I was elected in 2022 to the State Assembly. I became I'm the first Democrat elected in New York State at any level with a degree in computer science, a fact that I find 10 percent cool and 90 percent horrifying. Yeah. I'm like thinking about it in my head. I said, oh, I would say that if I were you.

3:31Astead Herndon:But as like a voter, I'm like, oh, that's probably not great. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I use that background, that knowledge to pass laws that actually protect people. Right. And it's not about being pro-innovation or anti-innovation. It's about shaping the technology so that it actually works for the vast majority of Americans. And one of the bills in particular that I passed was called the RAISE Act. Let's, again, stick with this. What did you do at Palantir? So I joined during the Obama administration, and I worked on civilian federal projects. What does that mean? So working with the Department of Justice to close down pill mills and tackle the opioid epidemic.

4:05Also going after the big banks for their role in the Great Recession. While I led the project, we recovered$20 billion for taxpayers from the big banks. I worked with the CDC to better track epidemics. I worked with the VA to better serve our veterans. It was about making use of data to make government actually function and work.

4:23Astead Herndon:I feel like people have a blind spot, myself included, just about like the specifics of that work. Because sometimes I can kind of feel like you say Palantir is working with the government to track something better, even good things like, you know, disease prevention and things like that. And my head goes immediately to like, are we talking surveillance? Like, are we talking about like kind of nefarious use of this type of technology? Like, what does it mean to say this private company is working with the government in those ways? Yeah, it's the right question to ask. And ultimately, we shouldn't be just trusting corporations to make these decisions.

4:56This is why you need people in Congress that actually understand the technology and how these contracts work to pass a privacy law that we are 30 years out of date of doing. And now with AI needs to be updated even more. But the specifics on the ground of the work that I did was data that the government already had access to and making better use of it to actually achieve its goals.

5:17Astead Herndon:I want to also ask about what was your break with Palantir? It seems as if there was a moment that caused you to leave. What was the moment that made you think, OK, my work here is dipped in from going from like government efficiency or something like that to something I'm more uncomfortable with? Well, to be clear, the work that I did was always in that realm of things that I was working on to improve. But the company broadly started working on other projects. And in particular, the one that was my red line was their work with ICE. So in the Obama administration, they had worked on things like human trafficking and drug trafficking and counterfeiting, right?

5:51Border crimes that are not controversial for the government to want to work on and solve. And then when Trump comes in in 2017, he starts pressuring for that software to be used for deportations, for civil immigration matters. That, for me, was the red line. And so when they told us that, that's when I made plans to quit.

6:05Astead Herndon:And is that still where we are? Like, it does seem like Palantir is still kind of like, you know, align with the Trump administration. I think they're way further. You know, at the time it was, oh, we're not going to stop it from being used. Now they're actively building features to make it better at doing that. I mean, it has gone so far from what we were all pitched on at the time during the Obama administration of trying to protect civil liberties, to fight fascism. Now they're enabling it. I can see the argument of like someone who knows these technologies and how they work being a kind of good force for regulator.

6:37Astead Herndon:But your opponents have also made the argument that they never got involved with this stuff in the first place, that things like, you know, companies like Palantir represented a kind of civil liberties threat. And it didn't take an ICE contract for some folks to know that. What's your response to that? Well, I think they're being opportunistic in how they look at this. You know, I have been very focused on actually making government work. And I think that's a good thing and something that we've been missing in the Democratic Party. And I've also, when challenged, put my morals and my principles over my career and over my financial security.

7:09And that was as a private citizen. That wasn't when I was running for office or positioning in some way. That's just I have red lines and I'm not going to cross them. Yeah, right.

7:16Astead Herndon:You gave up two mil in unvested stock options. It's a little gauche to say, but yes. I was about to say. I don't know if that makes you – I don't know if that's a good thing for your kind of logic for Congress. but it does kind of speak to the seriousness in which you took it. But it is the truth, you know? And so, you know, I'm proud of that choice. I'm proud of how I've moved. And, you know, I will continue to be that fighter in Congress. Before we get to the Raze Act, which I do want to talk about, I wanted to bring up some of the other things that Democrats have told us here, even on America Actually, specific to the question of AI regulation.

7:48Astead Herndon:We talked to Bernie Sanders about his call for a moratorium on data centers, saying that Americans would benefit from a pause button. Is that something you support? Why or why not? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we are rushing ahead on AI before we actually know how to align these incredibly dangerous systems and make sure that they are actually following human instructions or more to the point, human morals and attitudes, right? You talk to any of the frontier labs, they've all said, hey, we would support a pause if it's a thing that could happen, right? But you hear this in politics all the time.

8:19Oh, if we could change it, we'd do it, but we're stuck here. Okay, let's make it so. Like, that's the power of government to do that.

8:26Astead Herndon:Isn't the argument against if I can embody the others? I heard Senator Gallego actually told me this on the show also, that something like a moratorium puts us behind the race from China, does not allow these companies to innovate in the speed in which is necessary right now. Like, isn't there a reality of a kind of arms race that a moratorium could put us behind? If you act solely unilaterally, that becomes a risk. But I think what people miss in that conversation is there's actually a lot more alignment here than people realize. China is regulating AI far more than anything that's even been proposed in the Western Hemisphere.

9:02The CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, is terrified of an LLM saying the wrong thing and powering the wrong person. And so, listen, there's going to be parts where we compete. And I support export controls on China. And obviously, there's going to be certain sensitive areas where we're never going to align. But on the basics of verification of how AI works, on alignment of how AI works, on that research, there's actually room for us to be working together in a way to have this work for humans. We just need to put humans first.

9:30Astead Herndon:What about Sanders' call for public ownership of AI? He's recently announced legislation that would give people a 50 % equity stake in Frontier AI labs. How about that proposal? Yeah, I have a similar one to take stakes in the labs. The details really matter, and I know he's still working on the final language. I don't really want to give the Trump administration full control out of all these Frontier labs, But having the American people have a stake in them, I think, helps as a insurance policy for the potential disruption that is coming. This is your AI dividend? Exactly right. Can you explain it?

10:00Yeah. So the idea of the AI dividend is to give Americans a stake in the development of AI and approaching with humility that we don't know exactly what's going to happen with the labor market. We could hit a bottleneck and it could end up more like past technologies. Or this is the first technology where the makers of it are saying their goal is to replace all human labor. Doesn't mean they'll succeed, but like when that goal is on the table, government's got to take it seriously. So the AI dividend would raise revenue from a few sources to spend it on things to help protect Americans in this transition or to really just keep their security.

10:35So on the low end, that could be things like job retraining programs, investment in community colleges, tax breaks for companies that retain workers and retrain them instead of laying them off. In the middle, it could be something like a job guarantee. I mean, we have so much productive work in government at the city, state and federal level. We could put people to if we had the funding for it. And at the most disruptive, if it does replace all human labor or something close to it, could pay out a universal basic income or universal high income.

11:03Astead Herndon:Well, let's talk about the RAISE Act because, as you mentioned, it is the signature piece of legislation that you passed through the state assembly and represents a state model for AI regulation that I imagine will be a focus if you make it to Congress. What does the Act do? The RAISE Act was such a light-touch piece of legislation, but it is the strongest AI safety law in the country. So it says that the absolute largest frontier AI developers – so right now that would really only apply to XAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. Microsoft isn't there yet. They might be. Amazon isn't there yet.

11:36They might be. But the biggest of the big, they have to have a safety plan that they make public for how they'll handle risks around what could happen if someone were to misuse it for a bioweapon or how they could lose control of AI or like the really big impacts. They have to make that public. They have to then disclose to the government critical safety incidents, which we define in the bill as causing a serious injury or death or will imminently cause a serious injury or death. and share some of the other basic data with New York state government so that we can understand and be tracking what's happening and keep people safe.

12:13On the federal level, we need to do that plus third-party audits for all these companies and an actual developer duty of care. What does that mean? So that means that you take some responsibility for the product that's out there. In other words, if your model is failing your own test or best practices would say, this is particularly risky, you shouldn't release that to the public. So in other words, the tobacco companies were the first to know that cigarettes caused cancer, but they just denied it publicly and didn't act on that and kept doing it. With AI, these companies, many of them are the experts.

12:44And I think we should be hiring into government, getting our own expertise. But really, it's at these labs. If they are coming to the conclusion that there's an extreme risk here, they can't just bury that. They have to act on it.

12:53Astead Herndon:Right now, that incentive doesn't exist. Exactly right. So as you mentioned, this was significantly watered down before passage. New York Governor Kathy Hochul changed some stuff from the original bill. The original bill prohibited companies from leasing AI models that failed safety tests. That was removed. Penalties for AI companies were scaled back. If that watered down was coming from a Democrat in a blue state, what is the hope for AI legislation, at least on a robust level? On a national level, we haven't seen even willingness to do the first steps of that firm. I think there's a lot of fear among elected officials that if they try to regulate this technology, it will be the end of their political careers, that there's so much money on the other side.

13:34And we've even seen, you know, leadership within the Democratic Party tell marginal members, hey, maybe stay away from AI. Like there's so much money out there. And that, to your first question, comes back to why this race in particular is so important because the people who are scaring everyone, that are intimidating everyone, chose to make an example out of me. They chose to spend$10 million against me and say, we're going to do whatever it takes to beat me. And so if I win, that then becomes an example for everyone else that, hey, you don't have to water it down. Like, you know that 80 % of your constituents want there to be regulations on AI.

14:09And that can be a winning issue.

14:10Astead Herndon:Because that is the interesting part. We don't really see controversy from a ground level. There's a 70%, 80 % call for regulation. We see this consistently. Even things like moratoriums are things I hear much more from regular voter than from elected official. Is that gap between the Democratic electeds talking about this issue and the where voters are on that issue? Is that all just money? I think it's 80, 90 percent fear. For most elected officials hearing from their neighbors, hey, what are we doing? Like this is moving so fast. Why don't we get a say? I can't imagine they're not hearing it.

14:44We're all hearing it. All the time. And I tell you, every time I introduce a new AI policy in the campaign, I get texts from Congress members. Hey, this is great. Love this. You know, and I always respond, introduce it. Yeah. Like, I'm not going to be there for seven months. This is moving fast. Like, I'll help you write the bill. Like, let's go. Let's get it out there. And then it's crickets. And it's they know it's the right thing to do. They're just so scared of the money on the other side.

15:06Astead Herndon:Yeah. Part of me feels, and this is the cynical take, that, like, the window of 2024 was so important on this issue and that electives kind of blew it. Like, it feels to me as if why weren't we talking about AI regulation throughout that election? Like, why weren't we talking about the future of work during that election? Like, I worry that come four years from now, those impacts are here more so than it's a thing that people still can be, like, kind of proactively regulated against. This super PAC that's attacking me, they only have to win for, like, an election cycle or two. Right. Now is the moment.

15:37Now is the moment. And so they can go so big right now because they don't have to spend this forever. Like if they lock in a power structure where just a few billionaires get to decide how all of this works, you know, that might be a lot harder to change in four years than if we just get it right now. Assemblyman Boris, thank you so much for joining us.

15:54Astead Herndon:I appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. Up next, how a race in upper Manhattan and the Bronx highlights the splits among the Democratic Party nationally. We asked Daria Liza Avila-Chevalier, a Democratic socialist running in New York's 13th congressional district, the question that's on a lot of Democrats' minds right now. How far left is too far left.

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