Hochul wants artificial intelligence to be “less evil” — her words, not a critic’s. In a wide-ranging interview published on 31 August 2026 on The Verge’s Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel, New York Governor Kathy Hochul described AI as “in one sense a necessary evil”, then immediately reframed the problem as one the industry can fix: it “doesn’t have to be as evil as it is”. Her closing message to the AI companies was blunt. “Make it less evil, and people will adapt and adjust and understand this.”
The line is quotable, but the interview behind it is substantive. Hochul is the governor who signed the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers in July, who says she has “harnessed AI in the state of New York in a way no other governor has”, and who frames the whole debate through watching Bethlehem Steel abandon 20,000 Buffalo workers in 1982. She is also running for re-election against an opponent she says “embraces data centers”, which makes this as much an electoral document as a policy one.
This article walks through what Hochul actually said, the data center arithmetic behind her moratorium, how her administration uses generative AI tools internally, the job-displacement figures she keeps citing, and what her “less evil” standard signals for any organisation building an AI strategy right now. Every figure is traceable to a source in the References section.
Table of contents
- What Hochul Actually Said About ‘Less Evil’ AI
- Why Hochul Froze Hyperscale Data Centers
- The Numbers Behind Hochul’s Data Center Maths
- How Hochul Uses AI Inside New York State Government
- Job Displacement: Why Hochul Keeps Talking About Bethlehem Steel
- Hochul on Surveillance, Flock Cameras and Big Brother
- Teen Safety: The Meta Settlement and the Phone Ban
- Where Hochul Sits in the National AI Fight
- What ‘Less Evil’ AI Means for Your Business
- References
What Hochul Actually Said About 'Less Evil' AI
The phrase came at the end of an hour that covered data centers, surveillance cameras, teen safety, 3D-printed guns and the election. Asked about the industry’s standing with the public, Hochul rejected the premise that AI labs merely need better messaging.
Not a marketing problem — an attitude problem
The labs, she suggested, believe they have “a marketing problem” that better communication would solve. “I personally disagree with that,” Hochul said. “The products are known to people… They have an attitude problem.” In her telling, the companies are “complicit in this sense of, ‘We can do what we want because we’re so big'” — and voters “want people who are going to stand up and not just roll over.”
A necessary evil that can be made smaller
Hochul is not an AI abolitionist. She reached for a strikingly domestic example of the technology’s usefulness: “Your kid gets a bite, you’re going to take a picture and ask Claude, ‘Is this a tick bite or a mosquito bite? Do I need to worry about this?'” She even joked that if she were designing her executive chamber’s org chart today — famously first sketched on a legal pad — she would “probably ask Claude or ChatGPT for some recommendations.” The point of “necessary evil” is the adjective: the technology is staying, so the argument is about its terms.
The ask she keeps repeating
What would “less evil” look like in practice? Hochul kept returning to the same challenge: if you believe AI progress is inevitable and good, behave like it. “Why don’t you ask AI how to create power that uses less energy, uses less space? Can you go vertical?” she asked of data center builders. And to the labs: “Show us the jobs that can be created… Tell us right now the skills that are required. What should I be teaching in schools?”
| Action | What it does | Status and date |
|---|---|---|
| Executive Order 62 — hyperscale data center moratorium | Pauses state environmental permits for data centers of 50MW or more for up to a year | Signed 14 July 2026 |
| RAISE Act | Safety and transparency requirements on developers of advanced AI models, with a state oversight office | Signed December 2025 |
| AI review of state regulations | Machine review of every rule and policy on the books; thousands of recommendations produced in a month | First 50 acted on, 2026 |
| Meta settlement on teen safety | No overnight notifications to under-18s, limits on addictive algorithms, default privacy, chatbot disclaimers | Settled 2026, with dozens of states |
| Bell-to-bell school phone ban | Full ban on cell phones in schools statewide — the biggest state to do it | In force September 2025 |
| Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act | Requires notice when algorithmic pricing uses a customer’s personal data | Effective November 2025 |
| DIGIT office (proposed) | Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity and Trust — a central body for digital safety and technology governance | Proposed January 2026 |
Why Hochul Froze Hyperscale Data Centers
The most consequential decision discussed in the interview is the one already signed. On 14 July 2026, Hochul issued Executive Order 62, establishing the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers — defined as facilities consuming 50 megawatts of energy or more — while New York writes new standards for how they get approved.
The “aha moment”: thirty applications at once
The trigger was volume. “We were recently bombarded with 30 applications,” Hochul said. “That was the aha moment for me.” The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation will hold pending applications in abeyance while a Generic Environmental Impact Statement assesses energy demand, water use and quality, and air quality — the groundwork for consistent statewide rules on data center operations rather than town-by-town improvisation.
Small towns versus tech giants
Hochul’s fairness argument is about negotiating power. “Right now… a small-town, maybe a part-time mayor… are supposed to negotiate against a tech giant. It’s not going well,” she said. Her counter-example is South Bend, Indiana, where “the community received $143 million of benefits.” Within 60 days of the order, Empire State Development must publish a Community Investment Framework — guidance for negotiating local infrastructure improvements, child care investment and direct financial support, with prevailing-wage and project-labor standards attached.
Tax breaks, ratepayers and buyer’s remorse
Hochul was harshest on subsidies. “Why are there tax breaks in the state of New York for a data center? They have more money than God. They don’t need tax breaks.” She is pursuing legislation to repeal sales tax exemptions for large data centers, and has directed the Department of Public Service to require data centers “to either pay more for their energy or supply their own.” Her cautionary tale is Loudoun County, Virginia — where her own siblings live — where early tax abatements gave way to rising utility bills and property taxes. “There’s buyer’s remorse,” she said.
The Numbers Behind Hochul's Data Center Maths
Strip out the rhetoric and the interview contains a set of concrete figures that explain why a Democratic governor of a growth-hungry state chose a freeze. The scale problem is not abstract for New York: one county illustrates it.
One county, one nuclear reactor
“In upstate New York, there’s a county, St. Lawrence County. Five applications for data centers are pending right now,” Hochul said. Powering those five would consume “the equivalent of everything I would generate with one nuclear reactor.” Her question follows directly: “If we powered all of these requests for approvals, how much power would I have left for everybody else?” She also marvelled at the physical scale of the industry’s ambitions elsewhere: “one that’s seven miles large. Seven miles, I can’t even conceive of that.”
The chart below shows the two application counts Hochul cited, side by side.
The conditional ending
Hochul does not describe the moratorium as permanent. Success, at the end of it, means communities with “far more tools at their disposal than they do today” and an industry that builds better: “If they have to be there, are they doing it in the best way?… I’m going to challenge them. I know I’m going to keep pushing them to do better.” The freeze is leverage, and the pressure is spreading — Hochul says Texas Governor Greg Abbott “followed our leadership on the moratorium on hyperscale data centers.”
| Figure | What Hochul said |
|---|---|
| 50 MW | Threshold at which a data center counts as hyperscale under Executive Order 62 |
| 30 applications | The wave of hyperscale proposals that triggered the moratorium |
| 5 applications | Pending in St. Lawrence County — equal to one nuclear reactor’s output if approved |
| $143 million | Community benefits secured in South Bend, Indiana — the model for New York’s framework |
| 60 days | Deadline for Empire State Development to publish the Community Investment Framework |
| Up to 1 year | Length of the permitting pause while the state writes its standards |
How Hochul Uses AI Inside New York State Government
The paradox of the interview is that its sharpest AI critic may be American government’s most enthusiastic AI adopter. “I have harnessed AI in the state of New York, in state government in a way no other governor has,” Hochul claimed — and the project she described is genuinely unusual.
Reading every rule on the books
“I used AI to look at every single rule, regulation, policy, board, and commission,” she said. “What would it take for us to look at every rule in the books? Are they smart? Are they obsolete?” The result: “In literally a month, I had a list of thousands of recommendations, what would have taken five to 10 years for humans to do.”
A million and a half hours returned
The first tranche is already actioned. “I announced the first 50 already: we saved over a million and a half hours for New York businesses and individuals when it comes to filling out redundant forms,” Hochul said. The scrapped rules read like a museum of bureaucracy: a $25 fee for dog hunting permits, a $25,000 bond to move a mobile home on a highway, restrictions on pregnant women working after midnight, and regulatory references to “telegraph and telegram” communications.
Why this matters beyond New York
The regulatory-review project is a template other governments will copy, because it attacks a problem every administration has and no administration staffs: the stock of obsolete rules. It is also the kind of high-volume document work where the case for automation is cleanest — the same pattern that drives private-sector adoption of intelligent automation in compliance-heavy industries. Hochul’s version of “less evil” AI starts with using it on the state’s own paperwork before asking citizens to trust it anywhere else.
Job Displacement: Why Hochul Keeps Talking About Bethlehem Steel
Every time the conversation approached economics, Hochul returned to one biographical anchor. “My parents used to live in a trailer park near the steel mill… My dad worked there, my grandpa worked there,” she said of Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna plant. “In 1982, they picked up and left town. No one thought about the workers, the 20,000 workers in my town that now just lost their livelihoods. I lived through that. I will not let that happen now.”
The 81 percent figure
Hochul’s most striking displacement statistic is gendered: “81% of the jobs likely to be displaced are held by women.” Her framing is generational: “Women took this long to finally make it into the workplace… All the jobs that you can think of are held by women.” And political: “A woman might be the primary breadwinner. If she thinks her job’s going to be gone because of AI, she’s not going to love an AI company.”
“That’s a lot of people’s lives you just ruined”
Hochul reserved specific contempt for AI-branded layoffs. “Don’t make a big show about laying off 10,000 people in your company and literally tell them it’s because of AI,” she said. “That was more of a shareholders’ play… but that’s a lot of people’s lives you just ruined.” Her observation that data centers “have become the physical manifestation of people’s anxiety about the future” is one of the interview’s most useful lines — it explains why the infrastructure fight and the jobs fight are the same fight.
The other side of the ledger
The same governor is courting AI-adjacent industry at enormous scale. “Even Micron, the largest private-sector investment in American history. 50,000 jobs are happening up in Syracuse,” she said — a plant “building the memory chips that are necessary to power AI in New York state”, open within two years. New York, she added, has “been named the number-one job creator for tech jobs in the country” — ahead of California. The displacement anxiety and the recruitment pitch coexist; the moratorium is what reconciles them.
Hochul on Surveillance, Flock Cameras and Big Brother
The interview’s second technology fight is surveillance. Flock’s automated license plate readers — camera networks that use a computer vision system to log vehicle movements, a technology explained well in Wikipedia’s computer vision overview — have triggered what Hochul called a “deeply bipartisan” backlash that is “scrambling party lines.”
No Big Brother, no Flock contract
“I don’t want Big Brother. I don’t want unfettered surveillance of Americans that makes them anxious,” Hochul said. “It goes against the sense of liberty that we all have and deserve to have.” She also corrected the record on her own procurement: “I do not have a contract with Flock. That is a mischaracterization” — state public-safety money goes to police overtime and in-vehicle computers instead.
The human-in-the-loop demand
Hochul’s objection is to automation of consequence, not cameras as such. Traditional license plate readers are “different from the Flock cameras which are automatically transmitting information without human intervention, which is what I object to.” Her fix: data “has to be reviewed with human eyes” before any referral to “another law enforcement agency, the FBI or someone’s wanted list” — and never “an automatic referral of information to other agencies, whether it’s ICE or anybody else.”
It is the same principle enterprise AI governance keeps arriving at: authenticated systems still need human checkpoints before irreversible actions, a theme our piece on runtime trust for AI agents explores in the corporate context.
Teen Safety: The Meta Settlement and the Phone Ban
Hochul’s most finished piece of tech policy predates the interview: the multistate settlement with Meta and New York’s own school rules. She described the settlement’s terms with evident satisfaction, because “tech companies… are otherwise not doing [these things] on their own.”
What the settlement requires
| Requirement | Why Hochul says it matters |
|---|---|
| No notifications to under-18s between midnight and 6:00 AM | “These kids need to sleep” |
| Limits on addictive algorithms for young people | “It’s almost like cigarette smoking. The earlier you get them, the longer you’re going to keep them hooked” |
| Privacy controls on by default | Removes the burden of safe configuration from children |
| Limited AI chatbot access for minors, with disclaimers | “Making sure they understand this is not a real person” |
The darkest justification Hochul offered was algorithmic amplification of self-harm content: “Someone who’s thinking about suicide searches for ‘suicide’ and is now told different ways to commit suicide. That is terrifying for parents.”
The First Amendment answer
To the argument that platform regulation is censorship, Hochul — a lawyer — was dismissive: “The First Amendment is when the government says that we’re limiting your speech. Not having notifications that keep you awake all night when you’re a 13-year-old is not restricting your First Amendment right to free speech.”
The phone ban’s report card
New York’s bell-to-bell school phone ban took effect in September 2025, making it “the biggest state in the nation to have come up with a full ban on cell phones in schools.” The May survey results: “anywhere from 75% to 80% of the schools surveyed have been overwhelmingly positive.” Her favourite outcomes are analogue — “the kids who resisted at first are now making friends in person… They’re playing games at lunchtime… baseball cards… chess, bingo… They’re just being kids again.”
Where Hochul Sits in the National AI Fight
The interview lands in an election year in which, Hochul observed, “public opinion has shifted so quickly” that data centers are now campaign material nationwide: “in races for Congress and governor in other states, they’re using this as a political point.” The backlash is real enough that X recently claimed to have traced coordinated anti-data-center posts to a foreign influence operation — a claim we examined in our piece on the alleged Chinese bot farm — but the polling shift Hochul describes is organic and bipartisan.
New York’s model versus Washington’s
Hochul draws the contrast explicitly: “You have a president and Republicans in Congress, my Republican opponent, who are rolling over… In fact, my opponent embraces data centers. The President embraces data centers.” Her posture: “I’m not going to roll over. I don’t roll over for anybody.”
| Question | New York under Hochul | Federal posture, as Hochul describes it |
|---|---|---|
| Hyperscale data centers | Moratorium, environmental standards, community benefits, no tax breaks | Embraced; growth prioritised |
| Frontier AI model safety | RAISE Act obligations on advanced model developers | No equivalent federal statute; preemption pressure on states |
| AI in government operations | Deployed at scale on the regulatory review | Not a point of contrast Hochul concedes |
| Teen platform safety | Meta settlement terms plus state law | Left to the platforms; the states led the settlement |
The agenda still to come
The interview sits on top of a legislative program Hochul announced in January 2026: the proposed DIGIT office — the Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity and Trust, a “central, authoritative body for digital safety and technological governance” — plus provenance-data labelling for AI-generated content, deepfake bans around elections, and data broker registration with a central deletion mechanism. New York signed the RAISE Act in December 2025, imposing safety and transparency duties on developers of advanced AI models. Whether federal preemption efforts strangle any of it is the open question of 2027.
What 'Less Evil' AI Means for Your Business
It is tempting to file this interview under politics, but Hochul’s framework travels. “Make it less evil” is, functionally, a governance standard — and organisations deploying AI can read three practical signals out of it.
Regulation is arriving state by state, not all at once
If your organisation operates in or sells into New York, the RAISE Act, the Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act and the proposed provenance-labelling rules are already shaping compliance obligations — and other states copy New York the way Abbott copied the moratorium. Mapping AI deployments against frameworks like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework now is cheaper than retrofitting later, and it is the foundation of credible IT governance around AI systems.
Infrastructure costs are becoming political costs
Hochul’s “pay more for their energy or supply their own” directive previews a world where compute buyers carry grid costs that used to be socialised. Anyone planning AI workloads should watch the fight over siting and power — the same forces behind the federal lawsuit against a Microsoft-backed AI data center in New Jersey — because they will surface in cloud pricing long before they surface in legislation.
Trust is the product
Hochul’s tick-bite example is the tell: she reaches for AI when it is useful and personal, and distrusts it when it is imposed and opaque. That is exactly how customers behave. The businesses that win with AI will be the ones that can show their customers — and, increasingly, their regulators — where the human checkpoints are. “Make it less evil, and people will adapt and adjust” is not a bad one-line brief for any AI deployment. Handled well, the technology earns adoption; handled arrogantly, it earns a moratorium.
References
New York Governor Kathy Hochul thinks AI should be ‘less evil’ — The Verge, Decoder
Executive Order No. 62 — Establishing a Temporary Moratorium on Data Centers in New York
First Statewide Moratorium on New Hyperscale Data Centers Launched by Governor Kathy Hochul
Hochul enacts first statewide data center moratorium — Spectrum News NY1
New York Governor Unveils New AI Agenda — Ogletree Deakins
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