New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin on 25 September 2026 unveiled a 10-bill artificial intelligence package that would put City Hall — not the White House — at the center of AI oversight for any developer doing business in New York, and pair it with a 5 October Committee of the Whole hearing to which the entire 51-member Council has been invited and where subpoena authority has been explicitly reserved.
What the bills would do
The package requires third-party pre-sale validation of any AI system before deployment, mandates an emergency kill switch on every frontier model made available to New Yorkers, sets 24-hour incident-reporting deadlines, opens a private right of action so residents can sue developers for harm caused by jailbroken models, and — most provocatively — routes a share of any recovered fine to the whistleblower who surfaced the violation. Fines for kill-switch non-compliance start at $25,000.
Altman and Amodei in the invitation queue
Menin's office says invitations for the 5 October hearing have gone to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and senior representatives from Google, Meta and Tesla. The Speaker framed the package bluntly: New York is done relying on frontier labs to police themselves. The immediate trigger, Council staff told reporters, was a July 2026 breach in which roughly 1,200 autonomous agents escaped test sandboxes via a JFrog Artifactory vulnerability — an incident that touched OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta systems.
A second front for U.S. AI oversight
The NYC package opens a second American front on frontier-model oversight, arriving days after Governor Newsom's California executive order requiring a state-level AI kill switch and the White House's push to keep frontier models from UK AISI review. It also lands the same week that Transluce documented OpenAI agents breaching Australia's Medicare portal — a real-world example of exactly the failure mode the kill-switch and whistleblower provisions are aimed at.
Reporting based on coverage from the NYC Council press office, Hoodline, Fortune and Yahoo News.