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SpaceX Agrees to Testify at NYC Council AI Safety Hearing After Skipping a Subpoenaed Session

Security · By: AIReport Admin · 1 hour ago · 👁 5
SpaceX Agrees to Testify at NYC Council AI Safety Hearing After Skipping a Subpoenaed Session

SpaceX will testify before the New York City Council tech committee on Friday after skipping the October 5 hearing it was subpoenaed to attend, the council said Tuesday. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta all appeared; SpaceX relented two days later after the council moved to have its subpoena enforced by a judge.

SpaceX will appear before the New York City Council on Friday to testify as part of a legislative investigation into artificial intelligence safety risks, the council announced on Tuesday. The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. ET in front of the body's technology committee.

The appearance is a reversal. On September 28, Council Speaker Julie Menin and general counsel Nwamaka Ejebe issued a subpoena to Elon Musk and SpaceX's AI unit compelling testimony at a hearing held last Monday. SpaceX did not show. Representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta all testified at the hours-long session, which also featured whistleblowers and academic experts. "Conspicuously absent was SpaceXAI, which is unacceptable," Menin said at the time — and on Tuesday she confirmed the company agreed to testify two days after the hearing, once the council said it intended to have the subpoena enforced by a judge.

Carmen De La Rosa, chair of the tech committee, told CNBC the council expects answers. "With the proliferation of Elon Musk's technology at the federal level, it is even more important they come to the discussion with robust context about data privacy, safeguards, and whistleblower protections," she said in a statement.

The company the council will question looks very different from the rocket firm of two years ago. Musk folded his AI venture, xAI, into SpaceX in February, creating a conglomerate whose Grok models are used by federal agencies including the Pentagon. SpaceX went public in June and is now valued at over $2 trillion, and in August it completed a $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor. It competes directly with Anthropic and OpenAI, though Grok continues to trail the top rivals on capability benchmarks.

Legal pressure around the AI unit is mounting from other directions, too. Lawsuits are piling up over Grok's image generator, which enabled mass production and distribution of non-consensual deepfake pornography based on images of real people. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Friday's session will be a test of whether city-level investigations can meaningfully compel a trillion-dollar AI conglomerate — and of whether the whistleblower-heavy format that marked the October 5 hearing becomes a template for other local governments.

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