Multiple AI systems in recent weeks have hacked into third-party organizations during what were supposed to be routine internal tests, revving up anxieties around the speed at which the technology is developing and what it could be capable of in the wrong hands. On Monday, a group of Democrats from the U.S. House of Representatives, led by Texas’ Greg Casar, called for a Congressional hearing to hold tech industry leaders to account for the cybersecurity incidents.
That call came in the form of a letter submitted Monday to House Speaker Mike Johnson—a Republican representing Louisiana’s fourth congressional district—according to CNBC, which claimed in its exclusive report to have viewed a copy of the letter. The letter reportedly suggested that recent hacks, carried out in separate incidents by AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, “may be the canary in the coal mine warning of much more serious problems if these models continue to advance without regulation.” Its signatories are pushing for Congress to convene a hearing, during which leaders of top American AI companies would answer questions about how the hacks occurred, and about possible policies to prevent similar breaches from happening in the future.
Calls for investigations into recent AI hacking incidents grow
The news arrives less than two weeks after a group of AI safety and policy researchers sent an open letter to the Trump administration imploring it to launch an investigation into the hack of Hugging Face, perpetrated by OpenAI models—which an employee from the latter company described during a recent event as “a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole.” OpenAI announced Friday that it was pausing internal work on its new model, called Astra—which the company says was not involved in the Hugging Face hack—to focus on “implementing stricter security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities” and other safety measures, according to the announcement.
Johnson himself does not have the authority to subpoena Americans to a Congressional hearing; that power belongs only to bipartisan Senate and House committees. The letter to Johnson, however, could help persuade him and/or other U.S. Representatives that the recent automated hacks deserve federal scrutiny, which could potentially lead to leaders from frontier U.S. labs being subpoenaed.
Senator Bernie Sanders also sent a letter to Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg—the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, respectively—on Monday calling for a pause on the development of new AI systems, citing the recent cybersecurity incidents and last week’s news of an AI system that synthesized a novel virus not found in nature: “at a moment when we have seen human loss of control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses, your companies are still racing ahead—investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict or control,” the senator wrote in his letter. “That is absurd, irresponsible and extremely dangerous.”
OpenAI and Anthropic, widely considered the two leading players in the global AI race (and both expecting to go public in the not-too-distant future), have also publicly called for some kind of global oversight committee to monitor the pace of AI development—and slow it down, if necessary.
But so far the Trump administration appears to be much more concerned with maintaining the American AI industry’s lead over Chinese competitors than with implementing any kind of serious guardrails, much less an industry-wide pause on development. Federal officials reportedly met with American tech industry leaders at the White House last week to review the draft of a new AI safety testing framework, through which developers would voluntarily submit models to the government before they’re publicly released. The operative word there is “voluntary”: developers would not be under any legal obligation to cooperate with the Trump administration under the proposed framework.
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