On Monday, the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta sat in a New York City Council hearing room and raised their right hands. Speaker Julie Menin asked them under oath whether their companies carry insurance against a catastrophic AI failure.
Not one hand went up.
A former Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon testified that he thinks it is more likely than not that humanity loses control of these systems before the decade is out. A former Google DeepMind researcher said the real risk is not China, it is the misaligned system we build ourselves, right here at home. A former OpenAI researcher asked the labs to slow down and show their work before shipping the next one.
Menin’s answer was blunt. If nobody is insured, the public ends up covering the bill when something goes wrong.
I get why this sounds bleak. Three different labs, three different ex-employees, all saying some version of we are moving faster than we can insure against. That is not nothing, and it should not be waved off.
But look at what actually happened in that room. A city council, not a federal agency stuck in gridlock, put the biggest AI companies in the world under oath and asked a plain, grown up question: who pays when this breaks? That question was not part of the public record a year ago. Now there is a hearing transcript, and legislation on whistleblower protection and a private right of action against AI companies is already being discussed in the same building.
I still think AI is one of the best things happening to us right now, day to day, for regular people doing regular work. I also think you can hold both of those at once. Excited about what it builds, and glad somebody finally asked who cleans up if it breaks. Growing up with a powerful tool means asking exactly that kind of boring, necessary question.
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Sources:
https://council.nyc.gov/press/2026/09/28/3266/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/ex-anthropic-researcher-jacob-coxon-testifies-at-nyc-council-ai-hearing
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/05/anthropic-openai-google-meta-execs-testify-nyc-council-ai-hearing.html
Repost this. Thanks.