New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday, November 10, formally launched a statewide artificial intelligence science and safety effort that puts the New York Center for AI Responsibility and Research at Binghamton University in charge of independently testing the most powerful AI models — work the state says it will no longer leave to the companies that build the systems.
Source: Unite.AI — Hochul Launches Statewide AI Safety Testing Network in New York, Nov. 10, 2026
The center, known as NYCAIRR, will run independent evaluations of frontier AI models, carry out foundational safety research and train AI safety experts, the governor's office said. Its researchers will work as a statewide network of more than 80 researchers who stay based at their home institutions across New York while testing how advanced systems operate, whether they behave as intended, and how they can be used responsibly in medicine, scientific discovery and critical infrastructure.
Who will run the testing network
Greg Morrisett, dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, and Jeannette Wing, executive vice president for research at Columbia University, will serve as interim co-directors, guiding the scientific agenda, overseeing the independent evaluations and building the statewide network. The center will draw its computing power from Empire AI, the roughly $500 million public-private initiative that gives New York universities access to state-of-the-art AI computing.
A national recruitment effort will look for specialists in mathematical theory, formal methods and verification, agentic and complex systems, hardware security and privacy, interpretability and alignment, and scientific AI and biosecurity, according to the launch details reported by Unite.AI and GadgetReview.
“Too high to simply take AI companies at their word”
Hochul presented the independent testing as a direct check on developers' own claims about their systems. “The stakes are too high to simply take AI companies at their word,” she said, arguing that public officials need objective evidence of their own when they make AI safety and accountability decisions.
The November launch is a new step on an announcement first made on January 21, 2026, when Hochul unveiled the center during her State of the State agenda. That announcement was anchored by a $30 million philanthropic gift from a donor group led by Binghamton alumnus and Bloomberg LP co-founder Tom Secunda — the largest academic gift in Binghamton University's history — together with a $25 million research capital investment from the State University of New York. New York State is also providing operating capital. What is new this week is the formal launch itself: the statewide testing network, the named interim leadership and the independent-evaluation program are now switched on.
The RAISE Act clock is now running
Alongside the research launch, New York opened the RAISE Portal under the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, the state's frontier-AI law. Large frontier AI developers must use the portal to register with the state by January 1, 2027. The law is being implemented by the Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity, and Trust, known as DIGIT, inside the Department of Financial Services.
Under the implementation timetable the state set out on September 21, 2026, large developers must report critical safety incidents to DIGIT within 72 hours, file quarterly catastrophic-risk assessments and submit disclosure statements at least every other year. From January 2027, large developers must also publish safety frameworks, while all frontier developers must report critical safety incidents and publish model transparency reports.
The two halves of the system are designed to stay separate: DIGIT handles registration and reporting as the regulator, while NYCAIRR, at the state's request, can supply independent expertise, assessments and evidence, coordinate with DIGIT to review developers' published safety frameworks and recommend ways to strengthen the requirements.
What happens next
The practical test begins within weeks. Frontier AI developers operating in New York have until January 1, 2027 to register through the RAISE Portal, and the first published safety frameworks and incident reports will show whether the independent network gives officials evidence beyond companies' own publications. For New York's large technology workforce — including the state's big South Asian and Punjabi professional community in New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley — the center also opens a new public-sector research track in AI safety, a field that until now has been staffed almost entirely inside the AI companies themselves.
GadgetReview, which also reported the launch on November 10, described the Binghamton center as the nation's first independent AI research center at a public university, backed by the $55 million combined commitment, and noted that the center is expected to begin its work before the RAISE Act requirements take effect on January 1, 2027.