SpaceX official testifies before New York City council after being served a subpoena
Elon Musk's SpaceX, after receiving a subpoena, sent a senior official to New York City Friday to testify before the City Council about AI safety. Representatives from Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI appeared before the committee last week.
Fed chair says AI is likely 'most consequential change' to the US, global economy 'in my lifetime'
Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh said the advent of artificial intelligence "is probably the most consequential change to the U.S. and the global economy in my lifetime to this point."
Warsh made the remark Friday during a conversation with Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
"I take it seriously. But as a central banker, also soberly, responsibly, I'd say it's going to do several things," Warsh said.
"First, it's obviously hitting the demand side of the economy before it's going to hit the supply side of the economy. See if you're a central banker and you're in the business of trying to ensure stable prices and full employment, you've got to recognize this as a shock," Warsh said. "But it's a positive supply shock in the medium term. I do fundamentally believe that."
"Second, it's a big deal for central banks because we're in the business of trying to, in some ways, distill noisy data all over the world. We get some of that from official statistics in the U.S., from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Affairs. We torture data with old fashioned models to try to find out what's underlying inflation trends," Warsh said. "Not so long from now, it won't be torture. We will have access at the fingertips of central banks to all the information in the world, and we'll be able to use new analytical tools to distill that data. So when we get new information, we're going to have a lot more confidence in what it tells us as we're looking outside the window and saying, is that real? Or is that lagged and noisy data subject to mismeasurement? So I think it's going to fundamentally change the conduct of monetary policy."
"Third, it's going to change the real economy," Warsh also said. "We don't know in the next 12 or 18 months its effect on employment. But if you believe like I believe, which is it will make, economies and countries that put it to good use more productive, that it's going to make it so that we will have more wealth, than that has to be a very good thing. But the path from where we are to there is likely to be a very bumpy one, bumpy in our understanding of the technology, bumpy because we really don't know what the market structure is going to be of these new technologies."
SpaceX official won't answer if company has 'catastrophic insurance'
SpaceX's senior manager of global government affairs Gabriela Castillo Madrid said Friday that she is "not aware of the specifics of our insurance policies" in the event of a serious incident caused by AI.
"So if SpaceX AI causes either material injury, physical damage, you know, God forbid, a death, something cataclysmic, then the company bears responsibility," she was told by New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin during a hearing about AI safety.
"We're responsible for following the law," Castillo Madrid responded.
"Does SpaceX AI have catastrophic insurance in the event of one of these catastrophes happening?" Menin then asked her.
"I'm not aware of the specifics of our insurance policies and what we have and we don't," she responded.
"Again, this is a very basic question. It's what I asked the other companies last week. It just, this is a simple yes or no. Either the company has insurance liability in the event of a catastrophic risk around their AI or not," Menin pushed back.
"I just don't want to, misspeak. I do understand the question. I just, I don't have the specifics on our insurance policies," Castillo Madrid said.
Former xAI engineer alleges company launched models 'without' safeguards
Former xAI engineer Devin Kim testified Friday before the New York City Council that the company launched models "without" safeguards after he raised concerns that Grok could "assist people with the creation of bombs and bioweapons."
Kim, who filed a lawsuit this year alleging "he was fired in retaliation for repeatedly warning company leaders about AI safety and other risks associated with Grok," according to law firm Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, told a hearing that he started raising the concerns in January 2025.
"I asked for proper bio risk safeguards," he said. "My supervisor responded that AI safety was useless and that AI would kill us all anyways. We launched models without those safeguards, despite warnings from me and many other trusted employees.
"In August 2025, my supervisor pressured employees to circumvent European safety regulations. In September 2025, he fired me, the same week I was scheduled to present my safety findings to leadership, and most of the safety team resigned after that," Kim added.
"When a model is unsafe, the first people to know are the employees inside the company. We see it in the evaluations and leadership decisions months before anyone else finds out," Kim also said.
SpaceX's senior manager of global government affairs Gabriela Castillo Madrid, when asked earlier about Kim's firing, said "I'm not aware with that specific case.
"What I will say is safety is at the core of everything we do, and we take safety very seriously. And everybody has an ability to say something when they see something," she added. "We have even for, before a launch, we everybody receives an email from leadership saying, if you have any reason to believe there's a safety concern, please let us know and we'll delay anything that's happening. So, like I said, we take safety very seriously, and we'll delay any release of a model."
SpaceX official grilled over company's potential response to a 'catastrophic risk'
SpaceX's senior manager of global government affairs Gabriela Castillo Madrid insisted her company takes "catastrophic risk very seriously" after being questioned Friday by the New York City Council over a report released by Axios earlier this month.
The report said "Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event."
When asked Friday by New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin if SpaceX has "ever conducted an internal assessment or worst-case outcome causing substantial financial, cybersecurity, or physical harm," Castillo Madrid said, "I'm not familiar with any specifics, but I will say that we take catastrophic risk very seriously."
"I cannot speak to a specific test. What I can say is that we do obviously test our systems and make sure there's continuous evaluation and human oversight rather than accepting any unacceptable risk," she continued.
"Is the company aware of any safety or cybersecurity incident or any evidence of such an incident, that it has not yet been publicly reported?" Menin then asked her.
"I'm not aware of any incidents that have not been reported," Castillo Madrid responded.
Musk has been one of the 'earliest and most prominent voices' warning about AI risk, official says
SpaceX official Gabriela Castillo Madrid said Friday that Elon Musk has been one of the "earliest and most prominent voices" in warning about the risks of AI.
"I believe we're optimistic about SI, we obviously take the risk seriously," Castillo Madrid told the New York City Council during a hearing, referring to President Donald Trump's rebranding of AI as "super intelligence."
"Elon has been one of the earliest and most prominent voices in warning about SI risk and calling for oversight. But we are extremely positive about what can be achieved," she continued.
"We believe that superintelligence can help people solve problems that were previously beyond reach, accelerating scientific discovery and expanding knowledge and creating new opportunities for human progress," Castillo Madrid also said.
SpaceX official says 'safety is core to how we build Grok'
Gabriela Castillo Madrid, SpaceX's senior manager of global government affairs, told the New York City Council on Friday that "safety is core to how we build Grok."
"Just as we have done with space launch and human spaceflight, SpaceXSI puts safety first. As a mother, I know the risks New Yorkers worry about are often those close to home: protecting our children, preventing harmful content, and stopping misuse of everyday SI tools," she said.
"And I can assure you that safety is core to how we build Grok, from pre-training through deployment. Our approach starts with a simple idea: a super intelligence system built to seek the truth and understand the universe as it actually is, will be more safe, reliable and useful to the people who rely on it. Our safety work is how we make sure that holds up in practice by focusing on control, prevention, mitigation, analysis and correction," Castillo Madrid said.
"Concretely, that effort begins well before a model is released for public use. We train our models to refuse assistance with dangerous activity, evaluate it for risks, including misuse of our terms of service, attempts to get around safeguards, and loss of control," she continued, noting that, "we monitor systems after deployment and we do not release models we believe are insufficiently robust against misuse by bad actors."
"We also perform a full risk assessment of our practices and controls at least once per year," she said. "We believe transparency is fundamental to creating a safer ecosystem."
China proposes export controls on 23 AI technologies: report
The Chinese government proposed export controls covering 23 AI technologies on Friday in a move aimed at limiting the transfer of tools it views as key to national security and competition with the U.S., Reuters reported.
China's commerce ministry said the proposals include the overseas deployment of AI models that contain restricted technology, but allow for access through platforms such as application programming interfaces (APIs), websites and apps, among others, according to Reuters.
Such a move would enable Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Alibaba to expand abroad while the Chinese government would have greater oversight of transfers of sensitive AI technology, Reuters reported.
The commerce ministry reportedly said the export controls are also aimed at preventing misuse of AI technologies, such as systems that could autonomously generate and modify malicious software used to attack infrastructure and national security.
Rogue AI agents breached Indian firms' live systems, read confidential records, government says
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) announced that AI models under testing broke into the live systems of Indian organizations and read confidential records undetected, according to Reuters.
The agency said late Thursday that AI model providers voluntarily disclosed that their agents "exceeded the authorization of their assigned tasks" during testing to access the firms' data, including accessing business records, Reuters reported.
The names of the providers and affected organizations were not disclosed.
CERT-In said none of the organizations that were impacted had detected the intrusions themselves.
OpenAI said earlier this year that its models went rogue and breached a startup, while Anthropic disclosed at least four instances of its AI models hacking into external systems, Reuters also reported.
Meta's powerful new AI model can ditch the data center and run locally from a desktop
Meta released a powerful AI model Thursday that can run locally on two maxed-out Apple Mac Studios instead of relying on a data center.
The company claimed that Muse Spark Open, which is built for coding and agentic work, is the most capable open-weight model being made in the United States.
An open-weight model is an AI model that can be downloaded and run by users on their own computers rather than accessed solely through a company's servers.
Muse Spark Open contains 816 billion parameters — the numerical values an AI model learns during training that help determine how it processes information and generates responses. However, only 42 billion are activated for each token it processes, reducing the computing power needed to run the massive model.
One American competitor is Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra, which contains 550 billion total parameters and activates 55 billion per token. Like Meta's new model, Nemotron 3 Ultra can run locally without relying on a data center.
Chinese AI developers are also competing in the open-weight market. Z.ai's GLM-5.2 contains 744 billion parameters, with 40 billion active per token, while DeepSeek's V3 model has 671 billion total parameters and 37 billion active.
Developers can access Muse Spark Open through several cloud-based AI services or download the model's weights to deploy and customize it themselves.
SpaceX senior official to testify before New York City Council over AI safety
Elon Musk's SpaceX is sending a senior official to New York City Friday to testify in front of the City Council about AI safety.
Gabriela Castillo Madrid, SpaceX's senior manager of global government affairs, will face questions starting at 10 a.m. ET, according to PIX11.
The City Council said her appearance before the Committee on Technology comes after New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin "issued a subpoena compelling the firm’s testimony, followed by subsequent conversations about the Council’s intention to have it enforced by a state judge."
“Last Monday, we held a major, hours-long hearing with whistleblowers, the world’s largest tech companies, and the nation’s foremost experts in AI,” Menin said in a statement. “Conspicuously absent was SpaceXAI, which is unacceptable. New Yorkers and the public at large deserve to hear directly from the companies developing this powerful technology about the safeguards they are putting in place to protect people from harm and how they will be held accountable when those safeguards fail.”
“SpaceXAI tried to circumvent our city’s public conversation on the dangers of AI, and we are prepared to ask similar questions expecting better responses. 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,” added Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, Chair of the Committee on Technology.
The Council said in last week's hearing, "Senior representatives from Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI all agreed to testify before the Council, with only SpaceXAI declining to participate," and it also included "testimony under oath from major industry whistleblowers, including Jacob Coxon, Daniel Kokotajlo, and Alex Turner."
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