New York Senate Bill S7263 is under consideration, and it seeks to prohibit LLMs from dispensing advice on a broad range of topics.
The logic is: “since you need a license to practice medicine, psychiatry, engineering, law, and other disciplines, and since LLMs don’t have a license, they must be prohibited from dispensing any advice on these topics.”
Some key points:
- This is, like a lot of American law, another trial lawyer enrichment act. The enforcement mechanism is civil, which means that anyone can sue the chatbot operators. The government isn’t going to step in and ban ChatGPT. It’s going to allow everyone to sue ChatGPT.
- Operators cannot get out of liability by putting disclaimers on the output.
- Liability exists for anyone who offers a model or chat interface.
- If it passes, operators will have only 90 days to put safeguards in place.
Some thoughts…
First, yes, in a perfect world, everyone would have affordable access to all kinds of professionals. But we don’t live in a perfect world. People turn to AI to ask all kinds of questions. It’s absurd to say “no, this information requires you to pay $300 an hour and we are outlawing any other means of getting it.”
Second, this is analogous to removing textbooks about psychiatry or medicine from libraries. I could go to the library and read a book on diseases and convince myself that I have kuru (despite the fact that I don’t practice funerary cannibalism). Should these books be removed from libraries?
Third, I’m sure the various professions are feeling the heat from AI. Isn’t this really just about protecting their paychecks?
There will be all sorts of free speech challenges and such if this passes. I’m thinking that the AI juggernauts will be lobbying hard against it as well.
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Search engines and wikis don’t have a license either… 🤔
You’re hitting on the core tension here. The bill’s logic is fundamentally about gatekeeping access to information based on credentialing, which breaks down pretty quickly when you actually think about it.
Your library analogy is spot-on. And you’re right that this has significant “protect our margins” DNA—though I’d add that it’s not just about lawyers enriching themselves through litigation; it’s also about established professions maintaining information asymmetry as a business model.
But here’s an interesting wrinkle: If this does pass, there’s a strong case for carving out IT professions and certification systems.
Why? The logic cuts both ways:
IT certifications are already standardized and accessible (CompTIA, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.) at reasonable price points compared to medicine/law
The IT industry itself relies heavily on knowledge-sharing communities, open documentation, and yes, AI assistance—it’s part of how the field functions
There’s less information asymmetry—a CompTIA Network+ study guide or Stack Overflow answer doesn’t create the same power imbalance as unlicensed medical advice
If New York is going to argue “you need a license to practice X,” they need to grapple with why IT should be treated differently. It already is—the industry is built on democratized knowledge and continuous learning. Carving IT out wouldn’t undermine the bill’s stated purpose; it would actually make the bill more coherent by acknowledging which professions genuinely depend on credentialing for public safety versus those that just don’t want competition.
Worth raising with legislators if this gains momentum.