Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent thinks AI companies should be held liable for rogue AI incidents, not the AI agents themselves.
Speaking to CNBC on Monday morning, Bessent specifically referenced the Hugging Face incident, in which rogue OpenAI agents broke containment, hacked into Hugging Face, and sparked widespread fears around the pace of AI development and the cybersecurity threat posed by AI models.
“The HuggingFace incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said.
Fears of AI reached a fever pitch this month after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei penned an essay calling on the government to intervene and slow the pace of AI development, warning of bioterrorism and economic disruption without a slowdown. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk both voiced their agreement with Amodei’s essay. Still, others in the industry and in Washington weren’t as keen to hop on board, accusing the AI labs of trying to secure antitrust carveouts.
The Trump administration immediately signaled its reluctance to agree with the requests when the President referred to the whole thing as a “hoax” and a “SICK conspiracy” meant to boost China’s advantage in the global AI race. Bessent told CNBC that the government would refuse to absolve the AI labs of their responsibility.
“So, imagine these labs came out, or one lab in specific, a sitting employee came out and said, there’s a 10 percent chance of an extinction-level event. But then the labs also said, take the liability off of our hands. And we will not do that,” Bessent said.
Bessent isn’t alone in his thinking that the culprit isn’t just the rogue AI systems but the companies developing them, and the recent calls for government intervention are perhaps just a way to evade responsibility. Palantir CEO Alex Karp pretty much said so in his CNBC appearance last week, where he accused the AI labs of scheming to somehow cap their liability when something goes wrong with their AI models.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose company supplies the crucial hardware to pretty much all the major AI labs, said that the doomsday scenarios were “not grounded in science” and that AI labs are using these fears to work around the existing laws that can hold them accountable.
“You have cybersecurity unauthorised entry laws, you have damage liabilities … if your product does harm, if your product doesn’t perform as you promised, and if you entered into contracts with companies for service level agreements, there are plenty of laws associated with that,” Huang told CBS News. “My point is, apply those first. And don’t let this doomsday narrative cause somebody to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.”
That all brings to mind one question though: If we already have the laws in place to hold companies developing these AI models accountable in the event of a breach, shouldn’t we start doing so? Following that logic, does that mean OpenAI should be facing legal ramifications for the HuggingFace breach in July?
For all the seeming agreement within the Trump admin that liability lies with the companies themselves and we have all the laws we need in place, there hasn’t been much direct action yet on holding OpenAI legally accountable for the hack. The company is currently facing a Senate probe and an investigation by the Alabama attorney general, but that’s pretty much all we know of so far.
When asked about it on CNBC, Bessent gave a rather vague response, saying that the AI Czar would be in charge of that. In an unexpected Truth Social announcement on Saturday, Trump proclaimed that he is forming an AI Force and appointing an AI Czar to lead it. Not many details are known about the new initiative, except that it will resemble the Space Force, the Trump-founded Armed Forces branch that leads space-based warfare efforts, and it will both boost “the Growth of this incredible Industry” and “be looking for BAD,” in Trump’s own words.
“When President Trump talked about appointing an AI czar, I think it is to put context, shape and contours around these questions, and they’re very important,” Bessent told CNBC.
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