AI leaders say they can't quantify the tech's risks during heated hearing

All 51 members of the New York City Council turned up on Oct. 5 to ask OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and Google a straightforward question, and the answer they got was that the question cannot be answered. Not "here is our estimate, with error bars." Not "our modelling suggests a range." The four companies that have spent years telling us they are building the most consequential technology in human history could not quantify the risks in a worst-case catastrophic scenario. A heated hearing, USA Today reports. Heated about what — the thermostat?

There are 10 pieces of legislation on the table, covering the development, deployment and use of AI in New York City. So the arithmetic of the afternoon is four companies, ten bills, zero numbers. The industry's entire public posture is that it takes catastrophic risk seriously, and its entire testimony is that it cannot put a figure on catastrophic risk. You can't regulate what nobody will measure, and you certainly can't regulate it when the people who would have to do the measuring are the ones declining to. Ten to nothing, and the Council is the one that looks naive.

Anthropic, which told an Australian parliamentary inquiry it would be open to laws requiring AI companies to disclose breaches, sat in the same room and offered the same shrug. Being open to disclosure rules is easy when you have nothing to disclose and no way to quantify what you'd be disclosing. What the four firms could apparently agree on is only that the question is hard. All 51 members went home with ten bills and a headache, legislating against a hazard their own witnesses describe, in effect, as unmeasured and unmeasurable.