AI Labs Testify Under Oath With No Answers, Google Buys Nuclear Power, Wall Street Sets Records

This week the AI industry was put under oath, and none of it could say how bad the worst case gets. The same week Google bought a nuclear power station's worth of extra electricity, Finland ordered it to stop clearing forest, and Wall Street closed at record highs.

On Monday, October 5, the New York City Council held a rare full-committee hearing and put senior staff from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta under oath about the risks their technology poses. Speaker Julie Menin opened by dismissing the voluntary White House accord signed the week before: "The idea that artificial intelligence is going to self-regulate defies all reason." 1 Pressed on whether any of the four companies could quantify the risk of something cataclysmic, none could, and Menin called the answers "troubling at best." The Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon told the packed room it is "more likely than not that humanity loses control" and that it "could end in human extinction"; the former Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner warned that misaligned AI "one day may be more powerful than China." Elon Musk's SpaceXAI was the only company called that did not appear, despite a subpoena — Menin called it a "direct violation of the subpoena" and said the council plans to pursue the matter in court.

On Tuesday, October 6, Google agreed a 20-year power purchase deal with Constellation Energy for 3,590 megawatts, including 890 megawatts of new nuclear capacity unlocked by uprating at least 11 existing reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey; Constellation will spend $4.3 billion and expects the first uprated reactor only by 2028, while Google is on track to spend as much as $205 billion on data centers and compute this year. 2 The next day Finland's Licensing and Supervision Agency ordered Google's subsidiary to suspend work on two data center projects, at Muhos and Kajaani, until environmental impact assessments are finished — a deadline of October 23. Google said it had "fallen short of our own high standards in this instance." 3

The money never noticed. The S&P 500 closed 0.58 percent higher on Tuesday to an all-time high, past its mid-August peak, and the Nasdaq Composite set its own record; the S&P is up 14 percent and the Nasdaq 18.8 percent so far in 2026, with six of the Magnificent Seven higher. 4 Crunchbase's count for the third quarter landed in the same days: $159 billion of global venture funding, $102 billion of it — 64 percent — into AI startups, and a record 27 companies raising rounds of a billion dollars or more in a single quarter, out of $679 billion for the first three quarters of the year, the most of any year on record. 5