SpaceX AI Policy Chief to Testify Before NYC Council

SpaceX's head of global government affairs for AI, Gabriela Castillo Madrid, is set to appear before the New York City Council's Committee on Technology on Friday at 10 a.m. ET by video conference, the first time the company answers questions in a legislative investigation it spent a month trying to avoid.

What happened

The Council opened its AI safety probe after a month of heated debate over the risks of advanced models, and it plans to turn its findings into new regulation. At a nearly ten-hour hearing on Oct. 5, senior representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta testified under oath.

SpaceXAI did not show up, so Council Speaker Julie Menin issued a subpoena compelling the company to appear. According to the Council's own announcement, SpaceX agreed to testify on Oct. 13 only after the Speaker made clear she intended to have that subpoena enforced by a state judge. "SpaceXAI tried to circumvent our city's public conversation on the dangers of AI," said Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, chair of the technology committee.

Why the stakes are bigger than one city hearing

New York has no authority over federal AI policy, but the questions aimed at SpaceX are unusually concrete because the company now bundles much of what is under scrutiny. Musk merged xAI into SpaceX in February, putting the Grok model under the same roof as Starlink and the launch business. Grok is used by some federal agencies, including the Pentagon, and SpaceX paid $60 billion for AI coding startup Cursor in August, according to CNBC.

There is also a personal test case waiting. U.K. Parliament member Jess Asato testified at the Oct. 5 hearing about AI-enabled harassment and is suing xAI in the U.K., alleging Grok users generated and circulated sexualized images of her. By skipping that hearing, SpaceX avoided direct questioning from her, and the Council expects better answers on data privacy, safeguards and whistleblower protections when the company finally sits down.

What it means for builders

Two things travel well beyond New York. First, documentation is becoming the price of entry. Lawmakers are asking for safety-incident records and privacy audits rather than policy statements, and the pattern is not local: the FTC has already served civil subpoenas on OpenAI and Anthropic over consumer harms, as Ars Technica reported.

Second, "self-regulation is not enough" is now the working assumption of municipal lawmakers, not just federal ones. If you ship an agent into a regulated market, expect the same request for evidence trails, model versions, incident logs and evaluation results to arrive from buyers and city agencies, not only from Washington.

What to watch

Friday's testimony is the first public airing of how SpaceXAI answers for Grok, and the committee has signalled it will draft legislation from what it hears.