Monday morning, the New York City Council will kick off a marathon hearing on the risks AI poses to New Yorkers. Councilmembers with various levels of AI literacy will grill reps from the nation's leading AI companies and question high-profile whistleblowers about what exactly they mean when they say that their former employers are accelerating "the end of humanity."
City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced the extraordinary "Committee of the Whole" meeting—a hearing with all 51 council members, reserved for "matters of significant citywide importance"— in mid-September after a wave of scary news on AI, including the dramatic resignation of AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who warned AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade." The last time this type of council meeting was held was in 2022, to address the City's response to the migrant crisis.
Menin has secured quite the lineup for Monday's hearing: Coxon himself will testify, as well as two other ex-AI employees who are now sounding the alarm. Former Google Deepmind research scientist Alex Turner warns that AI that could try to "take control of key infrastructure and government functions" if following a "misaligned priority," and former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo has predicted a "70 percent chance that AI leads to global catastrophe."
The threats to New Yorkers from AI have long breached the realm of the hypothetical. Legislators have had to act quickly to install moratoriums on AI in schools and water-hungry data centers. The technology is devouring entry level tech jobs for New Yorkers. Local booksellers are selling thousands of titles to companies that destroy books to train their models. And the City comptroller warns he's already seeing a spike in automated attacks on the City's financial, accounting, contracting, and payment systems. The leaders of the United States' top AI companies now broadly agree that AI should be regulated (though OpenAI's Sam Altman told Politico that the world should "accept some bad things happening" in exchange for the benefits of the technology).
Officials from the City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the Office of Emergency Management and Office of Technology and Innovation, will also testify on what they're doing about AI, and the council will introduce a buffet of new AI legislation, including a "kill switch" bill, and policy to encourage AI whistleblowers.
Executives from Open AI, Anthropic, and Google initially declined to appear at the meeting. But after Menin threatened them with subpoenas, they will be there, along with Meta. Elon Musk's SpaceXAI, which runs Grok, ignored the invitation and threat of subpoena, and the council is exploring its legal options.
Councilmembers Carmen De La Rosa, Jennifer Gutiérrez and Chi Ossé told Hell Gate they were reading up over the weekend to be best prepared for the hearing, with some planning to bring snacks—with the meeting expected to stretch into the night. Here are four questions you can expect our elected representatives to ask on behalf of New Yorkers today: