The 51-member New York City Council hauled senior policy leads from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta into its first Committee of the Whole hearing since 2022 on October 5, putting them under oath to defend a 10-bill package that would rewrite how AI gets sold and deployed in the city.

Speaker Julie Menin’s Intro 2602 is the hinge. It would make it unlawful to market or run an AI system in NYC without independent third-party validation and a human kill switch. Menin told Fortune the fine, up to $25,000, applies per agent in a swarm. CM Carl Wilson’s Intro 2603 bars misleading safety claims and forces disclosure of whether a model was independently validated. CM Frank Morano’s Intro 2599 is a local version of EPIC’s People-First Chatbot Bill. Intro 2601 gives city contractors 24 hours to report AI incidents to Cyber Command.

The pressure the Council is applying isn’t abstract. Google has more than 14,000 NYC employees, Meta leases 1.2 million square feet at 50 Hudson Yards, Anthropic took a 16-story building at 330 Hudson Street over the summer and expects more than 1,000 city staff by year’s end, and OpenAI claimed 90,000 square feet at the Puck Building in 2024. Menin told CNBC the three AI firms agreed to appear only after subpoena threats. Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI didn’t show despite one.

Under questioning, OpenAI’s Morgan Dwyer said a percentage quantifying catastrophic risk “doesn’t matter.” Menin called the industry’s refusal to put a number on it “troubling at best.” Google’s Alice Friend offered the industry’s preferred frame: “if it’s illegal without AI, it’s still illegal with AI.”

Then Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic in September calling the work “gambling with our lives,” testified: “On the current path, I think it is more likely than not that humanity loses control to these AIs, and it could end in human extinction.” Fellow defectors Alex Turner (Google DeepMind) and Daniel Kokotajlo (OpenAI) joined him.

NYC is doing what Congress abandoned until 2027 and what Connecticut’s CART Act started at the state level: writing the rules locally while the frontier labs lease their floors.

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