The New York City Council held a Committee of the Whole hearing on artificial‑intelligence (AI) risks on 5 October 2026, where Council members questioned senior policy executives from leading AI companies under oath.
The panel included Morgan Dwyer, head of policy development and operations at OpenAI, Shane Cahill, director for privacy and AI legislation at Meta, Alice Friend, director of AI and emerging tech policy for Google, and Logan Graham, head of the frontier red team at Anthropic. Speaker Julie Menin asked each company representative to ‘quantify the risk posed by AI in the worst‑case catastrophic scenario’.
Former AI researchers who identified as whistle‑blowers also testified. Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, warned that ‘on the current path… it is more likely than not that humanity loses control to these AIs, and it could end in human extinction’. The whistle‑blower panel also included former OpenAI researcher Daniel Koktoajlo and former Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner.
by Digital Watch Observatory – New York City Council holds hearing on artificial‑intelligence risks
