Congress has spent nearly ten years holding hearings on artificial intelligence and passing almost nothing. Now the New York City Council wants to see whether a city hall can do what Washington would not. On Friday, Council Speaker Julie Menin put forward a package of bills that would make AI systems sold in the city pass outside checks, carry a kill switch, reward whistleblowers who report violations, and let New Yorkers sue the companies when their tools are turned to harm. The bills go before a hearing of all 51 council members on October 5.
Menin is not shy about the contradiction at the heart of it. She wants New York to remain what she calls the AI capital of the world, and she wants to govern the thing she is capital of. “We obviously are not in any way looking to stifle innovation,” she told Fortune. “I don’t believe these two ideas are mutually exclusive at all. In fact, I think they go hand in hand.” Her argument is that rules build trust: people use what they believe in. It is a neat defence, and it will be tested soon enough by the men whose companies pay for her skyline.
The council has invited five of them to the October 5 hearing: Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. The hearing is a Committee of the Whole, a ceremony the council has not staged since 2022. Sources familiar with the hearing told Fortune that none of the five is likely to turn up. The council reserves the right to subpoena them. The companies did not immediately answer requests for comment.
Menin came to politics as a regulatory lawyer and ran the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. She taught a course at Columbia called “When Cities Take the Lead”, about what cities should do “when the federal government is deregulating or failing to act.” She treats the bills as that course put into practice. “In New York City we regulate all sorts of products and services, everything from barber shops to nail salons,” she said, “and yet here we have a situation with AI where there is very little regulation.”
The federal record she is up against is long and nearly empty. The first AI bill, the FUTURE of AI Act, was introduced in 2017 and went nowhere. In 2023 Sam Altman stood before the Senate and asked to be regulated; Chuck Schumer answered with nine closed-door forums that produced a roadmap and no law. By 2025 Altman was telling senators that making companies seek government approval before releasing AI would be a disaster. A man can change his mind. An industry can buy one.
When Washington did move, it moved to stop others from moving. In July 2025 the Senate stripped out Senator Ted Cruz’s ten-year ban on state AI laws by a vote of 99 to 1. President Trump then set up a Justice Department task force to sue states over their AI statutes. Its first target was Colorado, which gutted its own law five weeks after the suit was filed. Even the resignation this month of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, warning that AI companies were gambling with human lives, produced only letters and investigations. The latest effort in the Senate, a bipartisan safety bill from Cruz, Amy Klobuchar and Majority Leader John Thune, would likely override most state laws, including New York’s own RAISE Act.
OpenAI, for its part, argued in a July post that states could fill the gap by passing laws that mirror one another. But it is New York City, not the states, where the industry has planted itself. Google has more than 14,000 employees in the city. Meta leases 1.2 million square feet at 50 Hudson Yards. Anthropic took an entire 16-story building at 330 Hudson Street this summer and expects more than 1,000 city employees by the end of the year; OpenAI took 90,000 square feet at the Puck Building in 2024. Menin draws the plain conclusion: “These companies have offices in New York. The product is being sold in New York, and we believe this falls into our domain to be able to regulate.”
What the bills would do
The broadest bill would bar any business from selling or deploying an AI system in the city unless an outside validator had checked it for data quality, bias, privacy and security, under standards set by the city’s Office of Cyber Command. Every system would need a kill switch: a human hand able to turn it off. The fine is $25,000 per instance, and Menin spells out what that means: “if there’s a swarm of agents, the penalty would apply per agent.” Her view of the alternative is short. “This is not an industry that should self-regulate,” she said. “Right now, the problem is that’s basically what the standard is.”
A second set of bills goes after the people inside. Whistleblowers would get a share of the fines recovered from companies that break the law, which the council believes to be a first in the nation, and a companion measure would shield city employees and contractors who report AI threats to public safety. A third bill would let people sue AI firms for harm done by third parties who break around the safety controls, where the harm was foreseeable and the company lacked reasonable safeguards. That one may end up testing federal law as well: courts have not settled whether Section 230, which shields platforms from liability for what users post, covers what an AI writes.
The rest of the package requires city contractors to report AI safety incidents within 24 hours, bans false or misleading safety claims, sets privacy rules for chatbots modelled on the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s People-First Chatbot Bill, and orders the city to prepare for AI-driven attacks on its own systems. More bills are promised, including a ban on deceptive deepfakes and a study of how algorithmic tools change job duties.
Our bills deal with all sorts of different ways that we can address the safety issue. We want to continue that as a hub of innovation. The idea of regulation in any way hampering that, I don’t believe in.
That is Menin’s case, and she makes it plainly enough. The harder question waits in Washington, where a task force exists precisely to erase laws like hers, and a Senate bill is being drafted that could do the erasing by statute. Colorado folded in five weeks. New York has more money, more lawyers and more of the industry inside its borders than Colorado ever had. On October 5 we will learn how many of the industry’s five chiefs think a city council is worth an afternoon.