The New York City Council subpoenaed Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI to testify at a Council hearing on Oct. 5 as the Council considers legislation that would place guardrails around artificial intelligence.

Council Speaker Julie Menin’s office sent a subpoena to SpaceXAI on Sept. 28 compelling its attendance and testimony for the Council hearing because the company was the only major AI platform that had not responded by the Sept. 28 deadline.

Menin’s office had asked Meta, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI to testify at a hearing of the New York City Council. Meta agreed to send a representative; Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI agreed to attend after Menin threatened to subpoena them.

The Council has also lined up several experts on AI to testify as the Council considers a package of legislation to address members’ concerns. Menin wants to require AI models to go through third-party validation to ensure that models meet a set of standards. She also wants to require any AI model being marketed in New York City to have a kill switch that would enable a human to turn off the AI model if necessary.

“Leading experts and AI executives themselves are warning about the potentially grave risks of rapidly advancing AI, and governments have a responsibility to act,” Menin said in a statement issued on Sept. 28.

The Oct. 5 Council hearing will consider some legislative solutions the city could enact to protect New Yorkers.

The hearing will explore the potential risks of AI for New Yorkers as well as legislative proposals the city could enact to establish stronger safeguards, including a whistleblower incentive program that would require a report of AI incidents related to city contracts, as well as a prohibition on AI using politicians’ images and voices to create deepfakes.

Recent security breaches and hacking by AI chatbots gone rogue are driving concern that governments need to step in to regulate AI.

On Sept. 28, OpenAI said it will not release its latest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after internal testing found that it did not meet the company’s safety standards.

Last week, OpenAI said it alerted global institutions that its AI agents may have meddled with their websites. The company said some of its models bypassed access controls, used exposed login credentials, or interacted with websites in ways that affected outside systems.

On “Meet the Press” on Sept. 27, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates again called for more regulation of AI, warning that people with “ill intent” could cause a mass casualty incident.