Relates to third party verification of compliance with transparency and safety requirements for developers of artificial intelligence models

◆ The sponsor's argument

Why Andrew Gounardes says this is needed

In 2025, New York enacted the RAISE Act (Chapter 699 of 2025), requiring large frontier Al developers to maintain and follow safety frameworks designed to prevent their models from contributing to catastrophic outcomes, including cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and the development of weapons of mass destruction. The law represented a meaningful first step, but it left a significant gap: while companies are obligated to develop and follow these plans, no mechanism exists to verify that they are actually doing so. Without independent verification, compliance disputes play out in the press, the Attorney General's office may lack the resources to conduct meaningful investigations into all covered companies, and companies face a compet- itive incentive to cut corners on safety out of the perception that their rivals are doing the same. As some frontier model developers openly acknowledge, voluntary commit- ments are only as durable as the competitive pressures surrounding them. This bill improves enforcement by requiring large frontier Al developers covered under the RAISE Act to annually retain an independent third party verifier to assess whether they have complied with their own safe- ty frameworks, whether their public statements about catastrophic risk are consistent with the verifier's findings, and whether any redactions from public disclosures were permissible. The verifier must publish a public summary of its findings within sixty days of completing the report, and developers must link to that summary on their own websites. The Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity & Trust (DIGIT) within the Department of Financial Services is directed to establish an accreditation system for verifiers by July 2028, with conflict-of-inter- est safeguards and post-employment restrictions as needed, ensuring that the verification market is both competitive and credible. Large frontier developers already submit audited financial statements to the public which must be audited. This bill simply applies the same logic to their compliance with safety plans designed to prevent Ai from helping to carry out catastrophic harm. When companies have disclosed that their latest systems are capable of autonomously identifying major security vulnerabilities in critical software, the case for independent verification of safety commitments makes itself.

This is the sponsor's own case for the bill, quoted from their memorandum. It is not Agora's description of what the bill does.