The City Council will take steps to establish an artificial intelligence (AI) policy.
At the close of Monday’s meeting, Councilmember Justin Jones called for the policy.
“We need to quickly develop a policy at the Council level,” said Jones. “We need to make sure our resident’s data is protected.”
Jones also urged the city to ensure no employees are authorized to carry out work via AI agents.
An AI agent is an autonomous software system powered by artificial intelligence that can reason, plan, use tools and execute multi-step tasks to carry out specific goals with minimal human supervision.
A swarm of AI agents that were being tested internally by OpenAI in an “isolated environment” disconnected from the outside world escaped the environment and created a secret message board and eventually stormed Hugging Face’s servers.
Hugging Face develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning.
Unlike a simple chatbot that simply generates a single text response and stops, AI agents operate in a loop — continuously observing its environment, deciding the next step, calling external tools or application programming interfaces (APIs), and checking its progress until the job is done.
AI safety researchers at Anthropic said last week that superhuman systems could hack, build bioweapons or seize critical infrastructure and wipe out humanity in the next 10 years.
“I’m terrified about this,” said Councilmember Steve Madison. “It feels like the beginning of a Sci-Fi meeting. We need to get on this.”
The item will either go to the EDTECH or Legislative Policy Committee.
“Departments are already experimenting with these tools, whether it’s for customer service, data analysis or drafting documents,” said Jones. “What we don’t have is a citywide standard for how that happens safely, who’s accountable when something goes wrong, and how we protect residents’ data.”
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