At a New York City Council hearing on the risks posed by Artificial Intelligence, Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams pressed representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google about the consequences of unchecked AI expansion. He cited an interaction he’d had with Claude about the lengths AI could go to in the aim of self-preservation through instrumental convergence, and named the atrocities of J. Marion Sims as a cautionary tale about the harms inflicted in pursuing so-called progress.
“What is the guardrail, that if we put it up, you would push back the hardest?” asked the Public Advocate. “What is the one guardrail that you don’t want to see happen, and for what reason?” Implied in that question is the notion that that is the level lawmakers should pursue. The Public Advocate released a report in mid-September, Artificially Inevitable, analyzing the current AI landscape and proposing guidelines for good governance of a technology and industry that changes daily.
The Public Advocate’s statement as prepared is available below. Video of his comments and question period can be found here.
STATEMENT OF PUBLIC ADVOCATE JUMAANE D. WILLIAMS TO THE NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE OCTOBER 5, 2026
Good morning,
My name is Jumaane D. Williams and I am the Public Advocate for the City of New York. I want to thank Speaker Menin, Chair De La Rosa and the Committee of the Whole for holding this important hearing today.
It’s hard to think of a technological advancement that has more quickly permeated culture than artificial intelligence. While there are many that have readily accepted artificial intelligence and its role in our society, portraying it as an inevitability, those seeking to push back on this notion and reject the role of artificial intelligence have largely fallen into two camps: doomerism – the idea that AI has already won and will literally or figuratively take over the world – or denialism, that it is either inherently wrong or has no positive uses. This discourse fails to account for the active role we can take in shaping AI’s impact through individual action and government regulation. The promises of AI are vast, and we should continue to explore potential benefits, safely. Past technological booms, such as smartphones and the advent of social media have left us in government trying to correct for damages to users that were often known to the companies decades later. Rather than waiting to uncover harm, we should be proactive, limiting exposure until it has been shown to be safe and the promised benefits have materialized.
Regulating artificial intelligence means protecting our most vulnerable populations from harmful exposure and furthermore, limiting the integration of artificial intelligence into our most critical systems. We have seen already what access to this technology without guardrails in place has led to – mass shootings and other acts of violence planned with the assistance of chatbots, suicides that could have been prevented, widespread harassment of women and girls with generated sexual images, the use of people’s likeness to scam unsuspecting victims. In pursuit of innovation and profit and amidst concerns of ceding ground to China, we have allowed industry to profit off the destruction and theft of copyrighted materials and other creative pursuits, and we’ve enabled the construction of countless data centers without regard for the environmental and economic impact on communities nearby, of which we are beginning to see the consequences. We should not normalize these harms and much of the legislation being heard today are common-sense measures that will address the lack of accountability and transparency we’ve seen thus far.
Finally, as labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph said in the 1960s, “the people should share in the fruits of technology,” and it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that collective good. A recent report released by my office expands on the need for good governance of artificial intelligence, analyzing the current regulatory landscape and proposing recommendations including, but not limited to, greater oversight of the kinds of contracts the city signs with vendors, robust data privacy protections, and ongoing public education and training for residents and workers in exposed job sectors.
Contrary to the White House’s position, to continue to invest in artificial intelligence and fail to implement guardrails — that would be the real abdication of responsibility.
I look forward to working with this Council and this administration to protect New Yorkers and enact meaningful and intentional legislation that safeguards our environment, our digital privacy, and the systems we trust and rely on. Thank you.