Six days before New York's AI hearing, four labs agreed to testify — the fifth got subpoenaed
Two governments moved on the frontier labs Monday — one with a subpoena, one with a lunch invitation. Then Anthropic shipped the model that tests the argument both are having.
New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin subpoenaed Elon Musk's SpaceXAI on Monday to force it to testify at an AI oversight hearing on October 5 — hours after Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta agreed to appear under oath. The council sent letters to five companies between September 15 and 17 giving them until Friday to respond; four eventually said yes. Anthropic came in late Sunday night, "just hours before the subpoena was due to be served," per the council. SpaceXAI never answered.
The hearing is a rare Committee of the Whole — all 51 members present, chaired by the Speaker, the first since 2022 — and the council's own framing of the scope is worth reading twice: it will assess whether fast-emerging risks to "public safety, cybersecurity, economic stability, privacy, consumers and businesses warrant immediate legislative action to protect New Yorkers." That language comes from correspondence signed by Menin and council attorney Nwamaka Ejebe. Musk's company is the only one compelled; he or another representative may satisfy the summons. If the company still doesn't show, the council's stated path is enforcement in New York State Supreme Court and then civil contempt sanctions.
Be precise about who the subpoena names, because the wire copy was not: it went to the company, not to Musk personally. The companies are being questioned under oath about a bill package we covered on Friday — New York City wants auditors, a kill switch and a paid whistleblower — which is the reason the witness chairs matter more than the subpoena does. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar-per-instance penalty regime is only as strong as the testimony that establishes what these systems actually did, and sworn statements create the record a private right of action and a whistleblower bounty need. Menin's own framing puts the burden on them: "Given the high stakes, these firms owe it to their workers and, above all, to the public to come before the Council, answer our questions, and provide input on our proposed legislation under oath."
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output — half the price of Opus 5.5 — and said it is the first Sonnet shipped with the cyber safeguards and fallbacks it reserves for its most capable models. The company's stated reason is uncomfortable: Sonnet 5.5's cybersecurity capabilities are a "large improvement" over Sonnet 5's, so higher-risk cyber requests will visibly fall back to the older model. It is the second release since chief executive Dario Amodei publicly asked rivals to slow the race, and Anthropic says the model does not advance the frontier of its capabilities — which is why its alignment testing focused on what it calls a targeted set of risks that apply to models at any capability level. Anthropic also says Sonnet 5.5 needs far fewer tokens and runs more than 30% faster, up to 30% less cost per task; Balyasny reported 121,000 tokens per answer against Sonnet 5's 497,000. It is live on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, with Haiku 5.5 coming in the coming weeks.
Read that against the subpoena above. The district attorney of the model-efficiency era is telling customers this release is cheaper and better at coding while also telling them the mid-tier model just got good enough at offense to need guarding. Theo Chu, a research product manager at Anthropic, drew the line for CNBC: Sonnet is for "the cost-conscious customer where they might not need as much intelligence... It might be routine tasks that just need execution, but don't need that judgment that Opus can bring." That is a sales pitch and a capability claim in the same sentence, and the price cut is the one the market already absorbed from Opus 5.5 — Anthropic's Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 for 40% less than Opus 5.
On Tuesday, Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Jensen Huang and OpenAI president Greg Brockman are expected at a luncheon with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, wrapped around an all-day administration event to launch a federal AI information site. The White House official account has panel discussions across AI, energy and space. It follows Amodei's private dinner with Trump on Sunday — the first one-on-one between them, which we covered as Trump invites Amodei to a private White House dinner — and the state dinner for Xi Jinping that Amodei pointedly skipped.
So the city with 51 members and a kill-switch bill gets sworn testimony, while the administration that calls AI fears a "hoax" and a "scam" gets a lunch and a website. That asymmetry is the story of the fall: the labs are being governed where they have offices, not where they have lobbyists.
What to watch: whether SpaceXAI appears on October 5 or tests the council's contempt power, and whether any lab repeats Anthropic's safeguard claim — a cheaper model that needs guarding is a much harder thing to sell at lunch.
If the mid-tier model now needs frontier safeguards, is a price cut on it a good deal for the customer or a liability transfer? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: NYC Council — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta to testify under oath · City & State New York — Council subpoenas Musk's SpaceXAI · New York Daily News — NYC Council issues subpoena to SpaceXAI · CNBC — SpaceXAI subpoenaed in AI safety investigation · Anthropic — Claude Sonnet 5.5 · CNBC — Anthropic's second release since the slowdown call · TechCrunch — Anthropic releases Sonnet 5.5 · CNBC — Zuckerberg, Amodei among executives to meet Trump
