Julie Menin

Jacob Coxon didn’t mince words at the New York City Council on Monday. The 27-year-old former Anthropic researcher, the whistleblower who last month warned AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” told all 51 council members that the world’s top AI labs have no business being trusted with the technology they’re building. “From my experience, the companies are being extremely reckless given the stakes,” Coxon said in his sworn testimony. “The companies run on a startup mindset: move fast, break things, fix them later. That works for a photo sharing app. It does not work for building the most powerful technology ever built.” ...

The biggest AI companies in the world don’t like answering questions on the record. On Monday, New York City is making them do it anyway. The NYC AI hearing convenes today, Oct. 5, with the full 51-member City Council sitting as a Committee of the Whole to interrogate OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta about the risks of the systems they’re racing to deploy. It’s the first time executives from the major AI labs will testify publicly under oath following months of alarming reports about AI agents misbehaving in the wild, including tens of thousands of reported safety incidents. ...