On Monday, the New York City Council issued a subpoena to Elon Musk, requiring him or a representative of SpaceXAI to testify regarding an investigation into the security risks of artificial intelligence.

According to a letter sent by Julie Meening ( Julie Menin ), the Speaker of the New York City Council, to Elon Musk, this "investigation will assess whether the rapidly emerging risks to public safety, cybersecurity, economic stability, privacy, consumers, and businesses require immediate legislative action to protect New Yorkers."

In February this year, SpaceX, the reusable rocket company under Elon Musk, merged with his other business AI, to form a conglomerate that now includes X and the chatbot Grok. The merged company went public in June and is currently valued at approximately $2 trillion. Last month, SpaceX completed a $60 billion acquisition of the programming startup AI.

After Grok allowed for the large-scale generation of unauthorized deep-faked pornographic content based on real-person images, lawsuits against SpaceXAI have been increasing. The city of Baltimore has accused the company of violating consumer protection laws and engaging in deceptive business practices by promoting its Grok image generation and editing tools as being safe overall.

SpaceXAI is also facing a proposed class action brought by teenagers, in which the plaintiffs claim that Grok has generated images that depict them in sexualized and demeaning scenes.

The New York City Council stated in a press release on Monday that Musk's testimony will take place on October 5th during a rare "full committee" hearing, at which time all 51 council members will be present.

The press release stated: "This hearing was held after several weeks of serious warnings from whistleblowers and AI executives. In addition, there have been reports that out-of-control AI agents have caused damage to government databases."

Watch: Representatives Liccardo and Kiley express their views on the US-China AI security proposal