BetaNYC testifies on ten New York City Council AI bills and proposes line-by-line amendments

On October 5, 2026, BetaNYC Executive Director Noel Hidalgo testified at a New York City Council Committee of the Whole hearing on AI risks and ten related bills, submitting written testimony, bill-by-bill recommendations, and an appendix. BetaNYC generally supports the package of bills but proposes several modifications: assign a trackable City AI model ID to each AI model, and publish certification, advertising disclosure, complaints, incident reports, and other records uniformly on the Open Data portal; distinguish between developers who train models, deployers who deploy models to the public, and publishers who release model weights; establish safe harbors for personal, research, and educational uses and for publishing model weights, and protect researchers who report issues. BetaNYC also calls for restoring and funding COPIC, establishing an open source program office, and building a public interest technology institute with CUNY.