New York’s financial regulator teams up with California and Illinois on AI safety

New York’s financial regulator is coordinating with California and Illinois on rules for the most powerful artificial intelligence systems. The New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) is the agency doing the work. What New York is actually requiring The centerpiece is New York’s Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, better known as the RAISE Act. It was signed on December 22, 2025, and takes effect January 1, 2027. Before then, large frontier developers must register with NYDFS. That registration window opens in November 2026. Once the law is live, covered companies face three main obligations: transparency, written safety frameworks, and incident reporting. Developers must publicly assess the safety of their models and report serious problems quickly. “Quickly” has a specific meaning here. New York requires incident reports within 72 hours, and within 24 hours when a threat is imminent. Not every chatbot startup is in scope. The rules target frontier models, defined as systems trained with more than 10²⁶ compute operations and built by companies with over $500 million in annual revenue. A new office with a long name Enforcement in New York will fall to a newly created...