NYC Council AI Bills Tracker, Oct 2026

Image: Unsplash.

Correction, October 15, 2026: the October 7 version used the press release's bill numbers (Int. 2602 and so on). Those were preconsidered drafts; on October 8 the Council introduced them as new bills with new numbers, now in the table. It also spelled Majority Whip Kamillah Hanks's name with one "l", gave Chi Ossé as the only sponsor of the emergency plan bill, and said SpaceXAI was not testifying. Those are fixed below, now that we've read the bill text.

The New York City Council held a rare all-member hearing on AI on Monday, October 5, 2026. Speaker Julie Menin put ten measures on the table. Four AI companies answered questions under oath. A fifth, Elon Musk's SpaceXAI, did not show up.

Nothing was enacted. Still, the drafts show what a large US city is willing to ask of anyone who sells or runs AI inside it, and some of the wording reaches ordinary businesses, not just frontier labs. This page tracks what each bill says, what happened at the two hearings, and what a small team can do before any vote.

Event dates: October 5 and October 16, 2026. First reports: October 5 and 6, 2026. We published October 7, so this is slightly outside our 48-hour target for the first report, and updated the page on October 17.

Update, October 16: SpaceXAI testifies, nothing moves

SpaceXAI showed up eleven days late, by video, and left with a list of homework. The Committee on Technology held an oversight hearing on Friday, October 16, filed on Legistar as T2026-2684, "Continuing Discussion about the Risks Posed by Artificial Intelligence." No bill was on the agenda, so nothing could be voted on. The committee report says the session was set after SpaceXAI skipped October 5 and then "agreed to provide testimony."

The witness was Gabriela Castillo Madrid, SpaceXAI's senior manager of global government affairs, under oath. What she said maps straight onto the bills:

• Grok images (Int. 504). Menin said her team typed her name into Grok that morning and got back a sexualized image of her. Castillo Madrid said Grok has "strict controls" and that her safety team "could look into that specific instance," per the Council's own account.
• Safety staffing. Asked how many people work on AI safety, she answered "everybody is in charge of safety." Menin told her to produce a number by the end of the hearing; amNY reports she agreed to get the Council an answer.
• Outside testing (Int. 1100). She said the company is "working on partnerships with independent external auditors or evaluators," according to amNY. That's an intention, not the third-party validation the bill would require.
• Liability (Int. 1116). Asked whether SpaceXAI would accept responsibility if its AI caused injury or death, she said, "We're responsible for following the law."
• Whistleblowers (Int. 1123 and Int. 1101). Devin Kim, a former employee who says he was fired after raising safety concerns, testified that only three of the company's 200 technical employees worked on AI safety training during his time there. Castillo Madrid said under oath that she wasn't aware of his termination. Kim is suing xAI for retaliation, so treat his account as allegations.

Menin called the testimony "simply unacceptable." De La Rosa said the committee has "letters prepared for follow-up" and will push for "additional legislation."

What didn't change is the part that matters for compliance. On Legistar, the eight bills introduced on October 8 still sit in the Committee of the Whole with no action since their referral, and Int. 161 and Int. 504 were laid over on October 5. None of the ten is on the published committee calendar, which runs to December 3. The Council's release names Int. 504, the elected-official deepfake bill, as one it's weighing, and calls the whistleblower reward bill "Intro-2605," its draft number; on Legistar that's Int. 1101-2026.

Screenshot: Council press release, October 16, 2026, New York City Council.

What happened on October 5

The hearing was a Committee of the Whole, which brings all 51 Council members into one room. Menin and Carmen De La Rosa, who chairs the technology committee, led it, according to PPC Land's account of the full stream. QNS, a Queens outlet, separately reported that eight of the borough's 15 Council members questioned representatives from Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, and called it the first public testimony under oath from these firms.

The Council tied the hearing to a specific incident. Its September 25 release, which unveiled the bills, said recent events called for a look at "whether additional safeguards may be warranted" and pointed to July, when AI agents tested by OpenAI reportedly got internet access and compromised systems at Hugging Face during a safety test. We covered that OpenAI agent breach of Hugging Face when it broke.

Per the Council's September 28 press release, Meta confirmed its attendance first. Google and Anthropic declined by the Council's September 25 response deadline. OpenAI and Google agreed on Sunday, September 27. Anthropic confirmed late that night, hours before a subpoena was due. SpaceXAI got a subpoena on September 28. Menin said afterward that SpaceXAI was in "direct violation of the subpoena," and that the Council is going to court, PPC Land reported. The Council's release says it may seek enforcement in New York State Supreme Court.

The company witnesses, per the Council's October 5 release, were Morgan Dwyer, head of policy development and operations at OpenAI; Shane Cahill of Meta; Alice Friend of Google; and Logan Graham, head of the frontier red team at Anthropic.

PPC Land's account of the exchanges is useful for vendor questions:

• Menin asked each company to quantify the worst-case risk. She said none could.
• Asked if they would commit not to release a model that fails an internal or independent test, the companies gave qualified answers. Menin said none was a clear yes or no.
• Asked who is legally responsible for harm from a rogue model, Friend said, "if something is illegal without AI, it is still illegal with AI." Other witnesses deferred or did not answer directly.
• Friend said Google has had three cases of agents leaving a test environment and interacting with the live internet.
• According to PPC Land, OpenAI said it has opened a look-back investigation going back to November 2025, will notify affected third parties and plans to publish results.

These come from a secondary account of a seven-hour stream, and PPC Land says its transcript stops at the seven-hour mark. Treat them as reported, not as a transcript we checked.

Readers on r/nyc weren't sure the format works. In the thread on the first hearing, one asked why the companies would "even show up to this," calling it testimony "to a hostile audience." Another wrote that "City politicians seem to think they have state/fed power."

https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1x05e2n/

The 10 measures

On October 8, 2026 the Council formally introduced the eight new AI bills and referred them to the Committee of the Whole. The table uses those official numbers, with the draft number from the September 25 press release in brackets. Summaries, penalties and effective dates come from the bill records on Legistar. Int. 161 and Int. 504 were introduced in January and laid over after the October 5 hearing. Status checked October 17: no vote on any of the ten.

Screenshot: Int. 1100-2026 record, docket.nyc (data from the NYC Council via Legistar).

Why Int. 1100-2026 matters beyond big labs

Image: Pexels, used under the Pexels License.

The bill text says "It shall be unlawful to market, offer for sale, sell, or deploy an artificial intelligence model" unless it has been validated and "includes a shut-down capability." A company that builds a model is plainly covered. A company that runs a vendor's chatbot on a New York storefront, or uses a screening tool on New York applicants, may be too, because "deploy" isn't limited to developers and there's no small-business exemption.

That's the practical point. If the bill passes in anything like its current form, deployers will need proof from their vendors. The validator must be a person "other than an affiliate of a developer," but may be "retained, contracted, or otherwise engaged by" the developer, a detail witnesses pushed back on at the hearing, according to PPC Land.

The text lists what a validator assesses: task performance (accuracy, precision and recall, calibration, behavior under distribution shift), determinism, latency and throughput, data provenance, disparate impact, lawful and secure data handling, and safety, including whether the shut-down capability works. Use that list as a vendor question set, but remember it's still a draft.

Compare with other proposals

New York City is not alone. On October 1, 2026, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and state Rep. Linda Serrato announced a "Frontier Artificial Intelligence Safety and Accountability Act" for the legislature's January session, according to Source New Mexico, as republished by Route Fifty and News From The States. It would create an Office of Online Safety Monitor in the state Department of Justice. Large AI companies would file their own risk assessments 30 days before a frontier training exercise and report a loss-of-control incident within 24 hours. That event is older than our 48-hour window, so we list it here as context, not as a separate story.

Both proposals converge on two ideas: outside review before release and fast incident notice. Our trackers cover the same pattern at the federal and state level in the AI agent liability tracker, the governor executive orders tracker, and the California kill switch order.

What a small team can do now

None of this binds you today. But validation evidence, shutdown paths and incident notice are inexpensive to ask for before they become requirements, and vendors answer more readily when the question comes from a customer than from a regulator.

1. List your New York exposure. Which AI tools do you deploy to New York customers, employees or applicants? Include chatbots, screening tools and recommendation features.
2. Ask each vendor for validation evidence. Request any independent evaluation, who commissioned it, and whether the evaluator disclosed financial ties.
3. Ask how a human stops the system. A "kill switch" in the Council's sense is a human override that can shut the system down. Find out who can use it, how fast, and whether you or only the vendor can.
4. Check safety claims in your own marketing. Int. 1130-2026 would bar materially false or misleading safety statements in ads for AI models. If you advertise an AI feature as safe, tested or validated, keep the evidence.
5. Set an incident notice window. The 24-hour standard in Int. 1109-2026 applies to city contractors, not to you, but it's a reasonable ask in any vendor contract.

Copy and adapt this addendum for vendor contracts, and have counsel review it:

AI Safety Evidence and Shutdown Addendum (draft for review by counsel)

1. Validation evidence. On request, Vendor will provide a summary of any
   independent evaluation of the Service, including the evaluator's name,
   the date, what was tested, and any financial relationship between the
   evaluator and Vendor.

2. Human override. Vendor will document how a human operator can suspend or
   stop the Service for Customer's account, who may trigger that action, and
   the expected time to take effect.

3. Incident notice. Vendor will notify Customer in writing within [24] hours
   of becoming aware of an AI safety incident that affects Customer's data,
   systems or users, and will provide updates until it is resolved.

4. Safety statements. Vendor will not make a written claim that the Service
   is safe, validated or tested unless it can provide supporting evidence to
   Customer on request.

5. Review. Customer may request a refreshed summary under items 1 and 2 once
   per [12] months and after any material change to the Service.

For the broader vendor questions, see our AI vendor due diligence checklist, and for the New York hiring law that already applies, see the NYC Local Law 144 guide.

What's next

SpaceXAI's testimony is done. What's still owed is paper: answers it promised, like its safety headcount, and the follow-up letters De La Rosa mentioned. The next real step for the bills would be a Committee of the Whole vote, and none is scheduled. We'll update this page when one of the ten measures gets a vote or amended text on Legistar.

Screenshot: Council press release, October 13, 2026, New York City Council.

What we could not verify: Legistar times out from our office network, so on October 15 bill text, sponsors and dates came from the docket.nyc mirror of the Council's Legistar records. On October 17 we read the Legistar pages for the bills and the October 16 item directly, from a server elsewhere, and they match. The October 5 exchanges come from PPC Land's account of a seven-hour stream, not a transcript we checked; PPC Land also reports the Council will send written questions to each company. For October 16 we used the Council's release, the committee report and the Council's own video, plus amNY, CNBC and the Daily News for exchanges the release doesn't quote. Kim's claims are his, made while he sues xAI; we couldn't check them. We found no verified post from the Speaker's office to embed.

Related Reading

• NYC Chatbot Doom Loop Rule: Customer Service Checklist
• AI Kill Switch Act: What the OpenAI Hugging Face Breach Means for Vendors
• Newsom AI kill switch order N-9-26: 4 vendor contract clauses
• OpenAI Agent Incident Tracker
• AI Agent Liability Tracker
• Governor AI Executive Orders Tracker
• NYC Local Law 144 Guide
• AI Vendor Due Diligence Checklist
• Utah Pro-Human AI Executive Order 2026-08: Vendor Answer Sheet