The City Council is taking on artificial intelligence — introducing a slate of bills Friday aimed at regulating AI companies doing business in the Big Apple, including by mandating “kill switches” and offering cash rewards for whistleblowers.
The package of legislative proposals will be debated in a rare council-wide hearing next month – where all 51 members will convene to discuss the potential risks the advancing technology poses to New Yorkers.
“New York City is fast becoming the technology and AI capital of the world, which we want to encourage,” Council Speaker Julie Menin said in a statement.
“But that also means we now have an even greater responsibility to ensure that we have the appropriate safeguards in place to protect New Yorkers from unintended consequences.”
Menin sent letters to the heads of five major artificial intelligence companies – Dario Amondei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta – requesting their presence at the October 5 hearing.
The move follows Gov. Kathy Hochul’s announcement earlier this week that the state would be requiring AI companies to register in a government portal starting in November, and to report critical safety incidents within 72 hours.
The council’s proposals include a mandate that AI companies cannot “market, offer for sale, or deploy” AI systems in the five boroughs without a third-party validation. That means tech companies would need an outside expert to vet its own internal safety claims.
The laws would also require so-called killed switches for any AI tool being used in the city, which the council defines as a “human override that can shut down the system.”
Failure to comply would result in a $25,000 fine for each offense.
A separate bill in the package would create a “first-in-the-nation-approach” to reward whistleblowers with cash from the fines collected from bad actors they help to catch.
“We have to remember that the city of New York regulates all sorts of industries,” Menin explained at an unrelated press conference Thursday.
“We (have) all sorts of regulations, and yet AI, and we have all the major AI companies located right here in New York, facing very little regulation.”
A spokesperson for the council said that the body was looking to regulate companies with offices in the Big Apple, and that the proposals introduced are specific to New Yorkers and are enforceable by the city.
The council, in a press release, attributed the apparent rush to put the laws before the lawmakers to “growing concerns that advanced and frontier AI model development could pose potentially catastrophic risks” without escalating oversight.
Concerns around rapid AI development skyrocketed earlier this month when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from his post as researcher at the AI company – claiming the fast-growing technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
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