On Monday, all 51 members of the New York City Council will put a question to four AI companies that may be better answered in Washington: should New York City decide which AI products can be sold and used in New York City?
Representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are expected to testify under oath at a Committee of the Whole hearing. Before them sits a ten-bill package from Speaker Julie Menin and her colleagues.
The concerns behind it are real. There have been reports of AI agents behaving in unexpected ways, and a prominent safety researcher has resigned with a public warning. Government has a legitimate role in protecting consumers and public safety. Some of the package is reasonable, including incident reporting and protections for employees who raise safety concerns.
But which level of government should regulate which risks is a separate question. The answer matters for New York’s future.
What the Bills Would Do
The most consequential proposals reach well beyond how City Hall buys and uses technology.
- Intro 2602 would make it unlawful to market, offer for sale, sell, or deploy an AI model in the city without third-party validation. Validators would assess data quality, bias, decision outputs, privacy, and security, plus anything else the city’s Cyber Command requires. Every system would also need a “kill switch.” The penalty is $25,000 per instance, and it applies to the business and the validator alike. Menin has said that in a swarm of agents, the penalty would apply per agent.
- Intro 2600 would let individuals sue AI companies for foreseeable harm caused by a third party who exploits a failure to maintain reasonable safeguards.
- Intro 2603 would require certain disclosures about AI tools and bar false or misleading safety claims.
- Intro 2605 would pay whistleblowers a share of the fines the city recovers.
These are not rules about how the city runs its own systems. They set conditions for whether private AI products can be offered in New York at all.
