--- --- Aug 26, 2025 # Alex Bores Assembly member, New York State by [Andrew R. Chow](/author/andrew-r-chow/) ## Andrew R. Chow Correspondent  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo) Because the U.S. is nowhere near close to passing national legislation on AI safety, state-level legislators now occupy an outsized role in reigning in the technology’s most powerful companies. One who has risen to the challenge is New York State assembly member Alex Bores. A computer engineer by training, Bores worked at Palantir for several years before leaving over, among other concerns, the company’s renewal of its contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Last year, he drafted the RAISE Act, an AI safety bill modeled after California’s SB 1047, which passed the state legislature before being [vetoed](https://time.com/7072014/mark-ruffalo-joseph-gordon-levitt-ai-bill-safety/ "undefined") by Governor Gavin Newsom last fall. Bores’s New York bill would compel large AI labs to publish safety reports and report alarming safety incidents—and subject them to civil penalties if they fail to comply. With support from AI safety advocates like [Geoffrey Hinton](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309026/geoffrey-hinton/ "undefined") and [Yoshua Bengio](https://time.com/7290554/yoshua-bengio-launches-lawzero-for-safer-ai/ "undefined"), the bill passed both New York legislative chambers in June by wide margins. It now sits on the desk of Governor Kathy Hochul. If signed, it would set the U.S.’s first legally-mandated safety standards for frontier AI developers. Unless AI lobbyists convince her otherwise: the tech industry is [reportedly](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/new-york-brief/lobbyists-spend-41-000-a-month-to-kill-ai-bill "undefined") campaigning aggressively for Hochul to not sign the bill. Bores argues that many of the industry’s talking points about the bill are irrelevant, like the idea it would harm rising entrepreneurs. The RAISE Act only applies to companies that surpass certain thresholds, including an $100 million minimum for training models. Bores argues that, at the moment, the act would only apply to roughly 6 companies, which are among the biggest in the world: Meta, xAI, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepSeek. Meanwhile, California has been working on its own new AI safety legislation, and it’s borrowing language from the RAISE Act. Bores is in touch with legislators across seven states, with hopes they can all pass similar policies instead of a patchwork of uneven regulation. “There should be a federal law on all this, but…that's not happening,” Bores says. “Now we're all committed to having consistency across the states and making something closer to one universal standard.” Alex Bores: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305812/alex-bores/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305812/alex-bores/"},"headline":"Alex Bores","datePublished":"2025-08-26T19:01:10.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:41.315Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305812/alex-bores/","keywords":["Tech","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades","TIME100 AI 2025"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blted9c58f3302045bd/6998c91d25f3ee6536644ee2/Alex-Bores.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Andrew R. Chow","jobTitle":"Correspondent","url":"https://time.com/author/andrew-r-chow/"}],"creator":"Andrew R. Chow","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blted9c58f3302045bd/6998c91d25f3ee6536644ee2/Alex-Bores.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305812/alex-bores/","name":"Alex Bores"}}]}] ```