A Few of the Diseases Invoked by AI Execs to Evade City Council's Safety Questions

Corporate executives from OpenAI, Meta, Google and Anthropic deflected, attempted charm, and repeatedly invoked their own personal health battles to justify the rapid expansion of their technology at an hourslong New York City Council hearing Monday. 

For a hearing on the risks of AI, the executives seemed remarkably unprepared—or remarkably prepared in weaponizing incompetence. None could quantify the risk of their product. None knew if their company had insurance for catastrophic risk. None could speak to the risk of the AI bubble bursting and New Yorkers' retirement savings going down the toilet. None had any idea whether their products had been used by ICE. None knew what the impact on the New York job market might be. How many people in their companies were working to address the risk of the potential extinction of humanity? "I don't have that number."

What they did know was that safety was absolutely at the core of everything they were doing and they all absolutely 100 percent support regulation, including New York's RAISE Act. 

This despite the fact that the companies lobbied to squash New York's landmark AI safety regulation law, as Councilmember Chi Ossé pointed out, and that OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife each donated $12.5 million to a super PAC that opposed pro-regulation candidates, as Speaker Julie Menin pointed out. (OpenAI's Morgan Dwyer said she couldn't comment on Brockman's "personal decision.")