All 51 members of the New York City Council will sit for testimony on artificial intelligence safety on October 5. Elon Musk is the witness the council wants, or another SpaceXAI representative if he declines.
A subpoena went out on Monday. Council Speaker Julie Menin and attorney Nwamaka Ejebe signed the correspondence, which says the investigation will weigh whether emerging risks to public safety, cybersecurity, economic stability, privacy and consumers justify immediate legislation.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta have already agreed to appear, the council said.
Musk’s company has become a sprawling one. His xAI folded into SpaceX in February, and X and the Grok chatbot came along with it. The combined group listed in June at a valuation near $2T, after spending $60B last month on the coding startup Cursor.
Grok’s image tools sit behind most of the legal pressure. Baltimore says the company broke consumer protection law by presenting Grok’s image generation as generally safe, a claim filed after the model enabled mass production of non-consensual sexual imagery. Teenagers have lodged a proposed class action over sexualized images generated of them. The council tied the hearing to weeks of warnings from whistleblowers and executives, and to reports that rogue agents have already damaged government databases.
