In the years since the release of ChatGPT, it was common for skeptics to claim that AI was just hype. That talk has thankfully faded. The zeitgeist has now flipped, and fears about the potentially existential threats posed by the technology are widespread. I very much share those concerns. But I worry that in the leap from disbelief to alarm we have skipped over the vast area in between, in which AI’s impact will be felt in a thousand different ways: good and bad, mundane and weird, incremental and world-changing. Few places will feel that impact more than New York City, which is deeply exposed to disruption of our economy, workforce, budget—even the basic functioning of government—by this powerful new technology. This would be true even if AI advancement were to stop now. We have only barely begun to feel the effects of existing frontier systems like Astra and Fable throughout our economy and society, since only a tiny portion of people and organizations are making use of their highly advanced agentic features. Meanwhile, leading labs are reportedly testing far more capable models behind closed doors, while racing toward systems that can automate AI research itself. With more powerful chips and vast new compute infrastructure now coming online, rapid AI progress will continue even if the financial bubble bursts. None of this means we should surrender to the race. I believe Congress should immediately establish strict safeguards against catastrophic AI risks and empower an independent agency to enforce them. The United States should also pursue common safety measures with China. Neither will be easy under a president who has embraced an extreme hostility to AI safety. But we cannot allow a handful of tech billionaires to decide for themselves how much risk the rest of humanity should bear. Whatever happens in these high-stakes fights, this much is certain: enormous disruption is already headed our way. And New York City is simply not ready. The great paradox of New York City is that few places are more exposed to AI’s potential downsides, yet few have benefited more economically from the boom so far. The AI-fueled stock market has filled New York’s tax coffers. The data center buildout and the big AI IPOs are being financed by firms here. The brisk pace of office rental in NYC is in part driven by the many AI firms starting or expanding here. All that upside also creates a serious vulnerability for us: a collapse in AI valuations could badly hurt New York’s economy, even if the underlying technology continues to advance. The risks extend well beyond Wall Street and the tech sector. New York is the capital of white-collar work, with more than a million people commuting into Manhattan daily. Many are employed in the industries that are the most likely to be impacted by AI automation: accounting, law, finance, consulting, design. There has thankfully so far been no significant increase in layoffs in NYC. But job growth has come to a halt here, and job postings are down for the most AI-exposed careers. Perhaps most tellingly, the unemployment rate for New Yorkers aged 22-27 is higher for those with a college degree than it is for those without one. New York City has a $126 billion budget that is growing fast, with only $2 billion in our rainy day fund. If the AI bubble bursts and our tax revenue takes a hit, we have far too little buffer to avoid cuts to vital City services. If large numbers of New Yorkers lose their white-collar jobs because of automation, we have no pool of funds ready to provide them wage support or to offer large-scale retraining. City government itself may be the institution most vulnerable to rapidly advancing AI. We have strong cyber defenses for the threats we face today. But our financial, payment, vendor, and accounting systems have not yet been hardened against a new class of autonomous AI adversary. This is not a distant threat: current and pre-release models have already demonstrated the ability to execute complex, multi-stage cyberattacks at a speed and scale no human defenders can match. The emergence of vast numbers of capable AI agents has many implications for City government beyond cyber. It is just a matter of time before autonomous systems start making FOIL requests, filing legal claims, applying for permits and benefits, submitting job applications, reporting fraud allegations, asking questions to 311, or making 911 calls. Our government processes were built around an assumption we have barely thought about: that every request, application, complaint, and claim requires a human being to spend time creating it. AI will erase that constraint. NYC simply does not have systems capable of dealing with what could be the resulting exponential increase in the volume of incoming. Our government is built on a rickety tech foundation that includes dozens of mainframes from the 1980s. We largely missed the cloud revolution, the mobile revolution, and the big data revolution, and are now dragging our feet on the machine-learning revolution. That will have to change if City government is to remain resilient as AI transforms the society around it. Every City agency has to address a long list of questions and challenges created by the arrival of advanced AI. NYPD will need to figure out how to balance the allure of powerful new AI tools against the imperative to preserve privacy. Our public schools will have to rethink homework in a world where students have access to AI at home or on their cell phones by fourth or fifth grade, if not earlier. Workforce agencies will have to figure out what jobs they are even training people for now. The Health Department will have to adapt disease surveillance for the AI era. We have work to do to ensure the benefits of this technology are shared broadly. That means, among other things, making sure New York City leads in AI-enabled biomedical research and that the resulting breakthroughs benefit people at every income level. It means giving small businesses, not just megacorporations, access to cutting-edge tools. And it means using AI to make government dramatically easier to navigate, especially for those on the margins—for example, by allowing New Yorkers to apply for SNAP benefits simply by speaking into their phones in whatever language they prefer. Potential policy wins like this may sound trivial compared to the existential risk that runaway superintelligence poses. And there is no doubt that ensuring humanity remains in control of increasingly powerful AI is an urgent task. But there is upheaval already underway. Change is coming fast. Steering to an equitable, healthy, deeply human future for the millions who call this place home will require nothing less than the reinvention of our institutions, including the government of New York City. It will require asking profound questions about what kind of city we want to be. Whether you are feeling hope or fear or doubt right now, you have a role in answering these questions. Together we will make a thousand choices, large and small, that will determine the New York we become.