Under oath, OpenAI's witness tells New York City the odds of an AI catastrophe are unknown, and no company at the hearing says it is insured against one
Three former lab researchers warned of losing control. SpaceXAI sent a letter instead of a witness, and the Council says it is taking its subpoena to court.
Why it matters: The frontier labs' first sworn public testimony produced no estimate of catastrophic risk and no insurance against it, which is the gap the Council's liability and kill-switch bills are written to fill.
The New York City Council met on Monday 5 October as a Committee of the Whole to question four AI companies under oath: Anthropic's Logan Graham, OpenAI's Morgan Dwyer, Meta's Shane Cahill and Google's Alice Friend. A photo caption in amNY shows the four testifying virtually.
Speaker Julie Menin asked the companies to estimate the chance of a catastrophe. Dwyer answered, amNY reports: “I don't know. I also don't think it matters whether it's 1% or 10% or a 20% chance that something catastrophic will go wrong.” Menin replied: “To say you don't know and it doesn't matter is flippant at best”. According to amNY, Graham did not give a percentage, and Cahill said he did not want to be imprecise and would follow up.
Fortune reports that when Menin asked the witnesses to raise a hand if their company carried insurance against catastrophic risks, none did. “So then the public, I assume, will be asked to absorb the costs,” she said.
Three former lab researchers also testified. The Next Web says Daniel Kokotajlo, formerly of OpenAI, and Alex Turner, formerly of Google DeepMind, testified remotely, both under subpoena, and it quotes Jacob Coxon, whom it describes as a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher, as saying it is “more likely than not that humanity loses control to these AIs”. Kokotajlo, as Fortune quotes him, warned that the industry risks “mistakenly thinking that it has solved the problem when really it just applied some duct tape that will fall off later”.
SpaceXAI, subpoenaed last week, sent no witness. La Voce di New York reports that it answered the subpoena with a letter; Menin told amNY the Council is “pursuing that subpoena in court”. CBS New York says the Council is considering 10 bills that would regulate AI in the city.
- Confirmed On the record, OpenAI's Morgan Dwyer said “I don't know” when asked the chance of a catastrophe, and Menin called the answer “flippant at best”. amNY
- Confirmed No witness raised a hand when Menin asked whose company carried insurance against catastrophic risks. Fortune
- Reported SpaceXAI replied to the subpoena with a letter and sent no one; Menin said the Council is pursuing legal action. La Voce di New York
- Reported Kokotajlo and Turner testified remotely under subpoena; Coxon said humanity is more likely than not to lose control to AI. The Next Web
Courts & policySafety, security & governance
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