Four AI Companies Testified Under Oath in New York. Asked If They Carry Insurance Against a Catastrophe, Nobody Raised a Hand. Musk's Company Didn't Show Up at All
About This Episode
On Monday, October 5, all 51 members of the New York City Council put policy chiefs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta under oath, in what Speaker Julie Menin calls the first time any legislative body has compelled frontier AI labs to answer for the technology's risks. None could quantify the odds of a catastrophe, none said they carried insurance against one, none could say who would be responsible, and none would commit to stopping a model that failed a test. Elon Musk's SpaceXAI ignored a subpoena. The council is weighing 10 bills, including mandatory third-party validation and a human kill switch for any AI sold in the city at $25,000 per violation, and a whistleblower bounty, less than a week after the White House handed the same companies a voluntary self-policing accord.
Our Take
The first legislative body anywhere to put frontier AI labs under oath asked four plain questions, how likely, are you insured, who pays, would you stop, and got no answers, a week after Washington made the labs their own regulator; now a city council is trying to build the accountability layer itself with a kill switch, a validation rule and a cash bounty, and the one company that didn't show up is the test of whether a city can.
Continue Reading on Unscarcity
The Liability Gap: What a License Really Sells
The hearing's unanswered questions (are you insured, who is responsible) are exactly the accountability wrapper this article says AI shipped without: a named party, posted capital, a duty of care, and standing, versus a terms-of-service sentence. The article's subject is licensed professions and its apparatus is malpractice-style cover for advice, not catastrophe cover a lab could buy today, so the fit is a lens.
Anthropic Pulled the AI Alarm. Who Can Act on It?
The article's frame of an alarm wired to nothing, a warning versus a protocol with pre-negotiated triggers and someone empowered to act, is what a city council with barber-shop licensing powers is trying to wire up after the federal government chose a voluntary accord.