If artificial intelligence really threatens to wipe out humanity, is the New York City Council going to be what saves us?
On Monday, Jacob Coxon, the former Anthropic researcher, continued his alarmism tour — minus the Harry Potter glasses — before a rare “Committee of the Whole” at City Hall, warning that AI could escape human control and kill us all. He ended his evening at the “Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, as one does.
“We do not know how to control any AI system yet,” Coxon told the Council. “We don’t understand its drives or why it does the things it does.
“We’re approaching the point at which the AI systems will be capable of improving themselves,” he added. “On the current path, I think it is more likely than not that humanity loses control to these AIs and it could end in human extinction.”
The event was organized by Speaker Julie Menin, who said representatives from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic agreed to participate only after the Council threatened subpoenas.
For starters, I have serious questions about Coxon’s “Chicken Little” tour writ large — not least how a 27-year-old with almost no social media presence managed to post AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade” and have it reach over 170 million views. New reports suggests a firm with ties to prominent AI doomerswere booking interviews for him, which would explain how he managed to do interviews with the most prominent and prestigious outlets and primetime shows.
But put all that aside. Even if you agree with Coxon about reining in artificial intelligence, it’s quite a leap from believing AI needs safeguards to believing those safeguards should be designed by New York’s City Hall — by officials who still haven’t figured out how to get children reading at grade level or keep people from being stabbed on the subway.
Yet Menin has said she wants to be the first in the nation to introduce serious restrictions — and that she will set the lead for Washington to follow. Not sure how she can do better than the likes of David Sacks and Marc Andreessen advising President Trump on these matters, but here we are.
As part of her effort, the Council is considering a slate of 10 bills that would stop the Great Catastrophe of AI.
The proposals range from holding chatbot providers liable for injuries they cause even when they take every reasonable precaution, to rewarding people who report AI violations with a share of the proceeds recovered — up to half if the city authorizes them to pursue enforcement. In another proposal, City Hall would dictate hourly reminders that a chatbot isn’t human.
While you’d be hard pressed to show how these laws benefit anyone except perhaps the City Council’s budget, they would indeed harm innovation.
Technology companies have been vocal that a patchwork of AI laws across myriad states and countries are particularly burdensome for startups that can’t afford massive compliance departments. That’s why Trump’s executive order to make AI policy a national issue has been so popular with those in tech.
New York is already expensive and heavily regulated. Why give an ambitious entrepreneur one more reason to launch somewhere else? The largest companies can hire more lawyers but smaller competitors often cannot.
New York would also risk losing the massive real estate footprint these companies are bringing to the city — which conveniently has arrived as many other tech company have been reducing their presence. Anthropic alone leased the entire 466,000-square-foot building at 330 Hudson Street, while Ramp expanded to nearly 300,000 feet and Harvey AI recently doubled it space to 185,000 square feet.
AI companies leased about 1.7 million square feet in Manhattan in the first half of 2026, according to CompStak and Savills research, and their share of new leasing has jumped from less than 1% in 2020 to nearly 10% — precisely the kind of business the commercial real estate sector needs.
All this makes clear that, contrary to what politicians like Menin think, the better part of valor when it comes to AI regulation is restraint. Don’t make it even harder for AI companies to benefit New York.
And if you can’t keep the streets clean, why should anyone trust you to design guardrails for some of the most advanced technology ever built? For now, start with the garbage.
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