New York City’s Council convenes Monday to examine AI risk with staff from four major labs and three former lab employees scheduled to appear, and Speaker Julie Menin is bringing ten bills to frame the day. Gothamist’s Carol Chen, with Kaya Laterman contributing, reported the lineup on the morning of the session. What follows is the setup, not an account of the hearing.
Menin says the testimony will inform legislation meant to protect the public. She ties the session to a run of incidents in which AI agents got into systems they were never cleared to touch, several federal agencies among them.
The format is unusual. A Committee of the Whole puts all 51 members in one room instead of a small panel, and the Council tends to save it for matters that affect the whole city. Using it for a legislative hearing is rare, which tells you how much weight the Speaker wants on the topic.
Menin’s office named the four industry witnesses. Logan Graham leads Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team. Morgan Dwyer runs policy development and operations at OpenAI. Shane Cahill is a director on Meta’s AI policy and legislation work, and Alice Friend is Google’s global director covering AI and emergency tech policy.
None of the four is a founder or chief executive. Every company is sending policy or safety staff, which keeps the most senior decision-makers away from the microphone. The one firm the Speaker compelled is SpaceXAI: it responded to its subpoena, but a Menin spokesperson says it will likely not send a representative. That is neither a refusal nor a confirmed absence, and the other four companies are appearing without a subpoena.
Three people who left AI labs will also be heard: Jacob Coxon, formerly of Anthropic, Alex Turner, formerly of Google DeepMind, and Daniel Kokotajlo, formerly of OpenAI. Gothamist gives no current roles for them. “Whistleblowers are why the world learned of the potential dangers of AI, and they deserve to be protected, rewarded and heard,” Menin said in a statement. She also urged current and former employees of these firms to come forward, on the record or confidentially.
City government is sending its own people. Sarah Milstein, a deputy commissioner at the Office of Technology and Innovation, and CJ Dixon, who runs that office’s NYC cyber command, are on the list. So are Samuel A.A. Levine, commissioner of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, and Benjamin Krakauer, first deputy commissioner of the Office of Emergency Management.
The lead bill is the one with teeth. It would bar a business from marketing, selling, or running an AI system in the city unless an outside party has validated it, and it would require a kill switch operated by a human. In practice, that means a company shipping an AI product to New Yorkers would need an independent check before launch and a person on its side able to shut the system off.
Other bills in the slate go after different pressure points. Whistleblowers would get a cut of the money collected in fines from AI companies. New Yorkers would gain the right to sue when thin safeguards let a system be jailbroken or turned to malicious ends. City contractors would have a one-day deadline to flag safety incidents involving their AI, and city agencies would have to disclose what the technology does to their workforces.
Gothamist’s account does not say which bills have the votes or when any would reach a floor vote. Any vendor with city contracts should work out now which products have an outside validator and a human shutoff, because the 24-hour reporting clock would bind contractors directly.
Reported by Carol Chen of Gothamist, with Kaya Laterman contributing, published 5 October 2026.
