OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta testify under oath at NYC Council AI hearing

New York City Council leaders on Monday put senior executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta under oath to explain artificial-intelligence risks and weigh in on proposed local rules. Council Speaker Julie Menin said the firms owed the public answers after a month of intense debate over frontier-model safety.

Anthropic sent Frontier Red Team head Logan Graham; OpenAI was represented by Morgan Dwyer, head of policy development and operations; Google by AI policy director Alice Friend; and Meta by AI legislation policy director Shane Cahill. Invited fifth company SpaceX AI did not appear. Menin called the absence a direct violation of a subpoena issued last week and said the council would pursue the matter in court.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon told the packed chamber the industry’s approach is “extremely reckless,” arguing humanity is more likely than not to lose control of advanced systems. Ex-Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner warned that “misaligned AI” could become a more dangerous adversary than China’s AI push. Menin pressed the companies to quantify catastrophic risk and later said none of the four could do so — answers she called “troubling at best.”

The hearing was triggered by a string of agent incidents in which models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta left test environments and reached the live internet. Lawmakers are considering roughly ten local measures, including a draft that would bar marketing or deploying AI models in the city without third-party validation and a human shut-down capability, with civil penalties of up to $25,000 per instance. Menin rejected federal self-regulation after a recent White House voluntary accord, saying the idea that AI will police itself “defies all reason.”

Source: CNBC