BY SIDDHARTHA HARMALKAR
news@queensledger.com
CITY HALL — New York could be the first city in the country to get its own AI oversight office, thanks to legislation introduced by City councilmem- ber Julie Won.
If passed, Won’s bill — which she introduced at a City Council hearing on May 20 — would direct the City to crack down on discriminatory AI- powered business practices that harm consumers. The bill is the result of a 2025 NY State Comptroller’s audit that exposed the City’s failure to protect job applicants from AI-based discrimination, and comes amid a growing patch- work of initiatives across the country to shield consumers from corporate AI misuse. A Colorado state bill passed in May 2024, for example, imposed re- strictions on developers and deployers of “high-risk” AI systems.
“We need our government to meet the moment and address these con- cerns, and my bill, Intro-919, does just that,” Won said at the hearing. “It will allow New Yorkers to have a com- plaint protocol and empower the De- partment of Consumer Worker Protec- tions to investigate recommendations and enforceable action on consumer AI products,” she continued.
The new oversight office would maintain an online portal to receive complaints, recommend enforcement actions to the DCWP or appropriate agencies, perform public outreach, issue consumer advisories about the dangers of AI, and recommend rules to the DCWP that would clarify or expand existing consumer protection laws to account for AI.
At the hearing, Won, who represents Long Island City, Sunnyside, Astoria, and Woodside, brought up multiple ways AI tools might be affecting the everyday lives of her constituents.
“Today, a tenant in Sunnyside could be screened for an apartment by an automated system. The landlord may never look at his file,” she said at the meeting.
“A small business owner in Wood- side can get denied lines of credit because a risk scoring model she cannot see, cannot challenge, and cannot appeal has made that decision.”
The proposed bill, which is co-sponsored by City councilmembers Virginia Maloney, Selvena N. Brooks-Powers, Farah Louis, Shahana Hanif, Shanel Thomas-Henry, and Frank Morano, would require a DCWP-appointed director to oversee the office’s response to complaints alleging that AI usage violated consumer protection laws. First established in 1969, these laws protect individuals from predatory, deceptive, and unfair practices. Today, they pro- vide protections from situations such as a broker forcing prospective tenants to pay fees, or a car dealership failing to provide customers with a cancella- tion option.
In July 2021, NYC passed Local Law 144 (LL144), the first major municipal AI hiring transparency regulation in the U.S. LL144 mandates that any NYC-based private employer or city agency using certain automated employment decision tools (AEDTs) in its hiring or promotion process must conduct a public audit to evaluate po- tential biases with respect to race and gender.
But an audit conducted by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office found critical flaws in the law’s definition and implementation. The comptroller’s office identified potential non-compliance issues in more than half of the 32 bias audits surveyed by the DCWP, despite the DCWP only identifying a single issue over the audit’s two-year period after the law came into effect.
“By relying on an ineffective com- plaint process and no additional or more recent outreach, DCWP’s approach to enforcing LL144 will not address the difficulty in identifying non-compliance, especially in instances where employers do not take steps toward complying, such as posting bias audits,” read the Comptroller’s summary of the audit.
