Congress goes quiet as AI safety concerns mount

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NEED TO KNOW

A previously unreported swarm of OpenAI agents went rogue , hacking into a German website and turning it into amessage board for each other.
- OpenAI executives reportedly “learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps .”
OpenAI launchedGPT-6 Astra , which is much more capable — but also harder to monitor — than previous models.
Sen. Bernie Sanders andRep. Greg Casar announced a bill banning artificial superintelligence.

But first…

THE BIG STORY

AI safety concerns are growing by the day. A swarm of OpenAI model agents hacked Hugging Face. A report from the UK’s AISI showed an Anthropic model taking on “multiple fake identities.” Last night, OpenAI released a new model which, as Transformer’s Celia Ford reports, is much harder to monitor than previous models, and which has OpenAI employees “deeply concerned.” And just today, we learned that OpenAI had yet another rogue AI incident this May, with models hacking into a German website and turning it into a message board for each other. “OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps,” Reuters reported.

Our elected representatives’ minds, however, are elsewhere. Half of Congress isn’t even in town — the Senate is still on “August” recess until September 14 — while House Republican leadership only briefly stopped in this week to get a funding bill passed, then immediately struck two weeks from the session calendar so members could go back to their home states for the midterms. Politicians are swamped: just not with the work of passing AI bills.

When I asked people on the Hill whether Congress might do something to address these recent incidents, the going message was “I’ll tell you if I have something.” Polite dismissal, which can be safely assumed to mean “no.”

Members haven’t been entirely silent. Sen. Sanders, Rep. Casar and Rep. Trahan have each called for hearings on the Hugging Face hack, while a letter signed by 20 representatives called on Speaker Johnson to schedule open hearings. But all those requests, as one Hill staffer put it, appear to have disappeared “into the August recess void.” Enthusiasm has fizzled, and, as far as I could report, no committee is making moves to have a hearing any time soon. Recent bills, meanwhile, might send a signal of enthusiasm — but they’re not going anywhere.

The rest is just math. The Senate has about eight session weeks left; the House has six. Three are between now and November’s midterms, for the Senate, and thus devoured by politics. (The House now has just one week before November.) The remainder are during the “lame duck” period, when Congress isn’t likely to be doing much besides working out the National Defense Authorization Act. (AI policy initiatives relevant to national security could get tacked on to the NDAA, but don’t expect much horse-trading for it before November.) Individually motivated members could write letters to executives, show up at companies’ doorsteps, and formally request more information (as Rep. Casar has done) — but they’d have a tough time building a coalition of members to join them.

The difficult thing about AI policy is not just that AI moves at the speed of Silicon Valley, and politics moves at the speed of DC. There are also competing priorities. The AI world is singularly focused on AI. Congress, meanwhile, faces a swath of different priorities at once. Members are dealing with AI, but also a big budget bill, the Iran war, congressional ethics scandals, and a litany of other topics. Add in recesses, shutdowns, and the time-intensive practice of running a midterm campaign, and split attention is guaranteed. AI — for all its importance — struggles to stand out.

What is happening in frontier AI right now is extremely concerning and extremely pressing. But it’s happened at a uniquely bad time to grab DC’s attention, which is already dysfunctional and politically driven. While the AI safety universe panics over the Hugging Face incident, the rest of America is stuck on data centers, Flock cameras, and even a few non-AI topics. For better or worse, that’s where Congress’ attention will go, too.

— Veronica Irwin

THIS WEEK ON TRANSFORMER

GPT-6 Astra might be too powerful to understand or control —Celia Ford looks under the hood at OpenAI’s latest model, revealing that even its creators can’t reliably tell when it’s aligned or just playing along
What’s neuralese and why is everyone so concerned about it? —Shakeel Hashim assesses the latest worries over monitoring the reasoning of advanced AI systems
AI is a worryingly-good persuader. But don’t panic, yet —Felix Simon breaks down whether or not persuasive AI systems could really trigger meaningful real-world influence

THE DISCOURSE

Dwarkesh Patel wrote a very viral take on the Hugging Face incident:

“Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.”

Ajeya Cotra, one of the external researchers at METR who investigated the Hugging Face incident, wrote about it:

“This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover , routing through first taking over the AI company itself.”

The posts got Sen. Bernie Sanders’ attention:

“We need an immediate on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario.”

Rep. Sam Liccardo’s worried, too:

“An exponential ‘intelligence explosion’ could leave us with a dystopian tyranny of AI agents we only imagined in sci-fi novels … Congress should enact sensible measures mandating AI transparency, pre-release evaluation, ongoing testing, third-party auditing, and the like.”

Chamath Palihapitiya downplayed it all:

“This is another Covid hoax. Remember ‘Trust the experts.’”

Former Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin called for a new interagency AI oversight body and a US-China AI treaty:

“When Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet this month, we encourage the leaders to consider that history and work toward an ‘ACT’ — AI Cooperation Treaty.”
“The recurring error in markets is not failing to see a risk. It is assuming a risk is small when it may be large. We believe the same troubling assumption is being made about frontier AI today.”

Sam Altman warned at the G20:

“I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently.”

Elon Musk used his moment at the G20 to call on countries to build data centers:

“There actually is a crisis of power … There will be a significant power shortfall next year. The consensus estimate is there will be a 15GW power shortfall in 2027 for AI chips.”

And President Trump took an interesting approach to the issue:

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor … If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

POLICY

A federal judgeoverturned thePentagon’s “illegal and baseless” blacklisting ofAnthropic as a national security supply chain risk.
GPT-6 went through theWhite House’s new evaluation framework with no requested changes to safeguards,according toOpenAI’s****Greg Brockman .
Trump’s****pro-data center stanceis straining Republicans ahead of midterms, as70% of Americans oppose local data centers.
- A GOP narrative is emerging that blames tech companies for the data center backlash, as exemplified bycriticism fromTreasury Secretary Scott Bessent that AI companies do a “terrible job” of explaining AI’s benefits.
- Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also attempted to dismiss misleading claims about data center water use with a separate falseclaim : that data centers “don’t use water,” at all.
- Meanwhile, vulnerable House Republicanspushed leadership for data center legislation ahead of the midterms.
- They were unsuccessful. Instead, Speaker Mike Johnsonsaid data centers are “necessary” for US AI competitiveness withChina but must address local concerns.
- Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffriespiled on , attempting to direct voter anger over data centers toward Republicans. His strategy focuses on criticism of a tax break wedged into the**“Big Beautiful Bill,”** which Republicans once framed as a way to boost data center construction.
- A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held adebate aboutdata centers’ water use on Thursday.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnickdiscussed AI regulation, arguing that the public “should get a guardrailed model” that blocks answers to “nasty” questions.
The Trump administration isplanning fresh semiconductor tariffs to boost US manufacturing,Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed.
The White House is alsoreportedly working to close a loophole allowingChinese firms to remotely access advanced chips viaoverseas data centers .
The Trump administrationfiled a brief supportingOpenAI in itsNew York Times lawsuit, arguing AI training is fair use of copyrighted material.
Vice President JD Vanceexpressed concern about “spiritual dark energy” around some AI practices, such as the “funeral” for Claude 3 Sonnet.
Sen. Bernie Sanders andRep. Greg Casarannounced a bill banning artificial superintelligence and pausing advanced AI development.
The authors of California’s SB 53 ,New York’s RAISE Act , andIllinois’ SB 315urged AI companies to establish a binding agreement to pace development and “eliminate the risk that a catastrophe will result from their rush to build highly capable AI systems before solving problems of alignment and safety.”
In response to a request for information from Reps. Casar andMatsui , OpenAIsaid it is developing “automated shutdown capabilities ” for AI systems after theHugging Face incident.
- Casar called both OpenAI and Anthropic’s responses to his letters “insufficient,” demanding more information.
The House Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade subcommitteeadvanced threeAI and chips bills by voice vote.
- The bills are the Memory Chip Competitiveness Assessment Act ,Open-Source AI Leadership Act and theChip EQUIP Act .
A House Intelligence Committee reportwarned that AI could help terrorists developweapons of mass destruction , urging spy agencies to better prepare for “Black Swan” risks.
G20 nations unanimouslyendorsed the**“Carolina Principles,”** a US-proposedregulatory framework that endorses a light-touch approach to regulating AI which would avoid creating new regulatory bodies.
- Nvidia’s****Jensen Huanghelped apply pressure.
- The US delegation was reportedly plagued by internal tensions between theCommerce Department and the White HouseOffice for Science and Technology Policy .
Flock continued to get flak.
The California legislatureapprovedstate Sen. Jerry McNerney’s****SB 813 , which establishes a voluntary framework for independent third-party AI safety assessments.
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdanibanned generative AI use for ~600,000 elementary and middleschool students for one year.
ChatGPT wasdesignated a very large online search engine under theEU ’sDigital Services Act , triggering stricter content moderation rules.
UK Lordsattempted to insert an** AI kill-switch provision** into the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill.
- The government has rejected this specific effort, but a minister said the government is consideringtargeted interventions , which “includes examining whether proportionate containment powers could provide a more effective and targeted response, including powers to restrict access to specific AI systems where necessary to prevent or mitigate serious harm.”

INFLUENCE

Mark Zuckerbergopposed a FINRA-stylenational AI regulator in a call withPresident Trump , according to a White House official.
Sam Altman reportedlycontactedGov. Gavin Newsom to voice last-minute concerns about California’schild-safety chatbot bill.
- The bill passed the legislature Monday night. OpenAI publicly endorsed it on Monday, too.
Anthropic andOpenAIare split over aMassachusetts bill which would be the strongest frontier model legislation in the country.
- Anthropic endorses the bill’s strong independent audit provisions , which OpenAI is pushing to water down.
Build American AI — the dark money group and advocacy arm ofGreg Brockman anda16z -backed super PACLeading the Future —launched its own super PAC focused on backingpro-data center candidates.
- The group has not disclosed donors, but says Build American AI has**$50m** on hand.
Build American AI alsolaunched a multimillion-dollarad campaign to counter data center backlash in battleground states.
Congressional briefings on AI privacy fromCivAI havespurred a bipartisan push fordata broker warrant requirements .
- The demos show how easy it now is to build a dossier on random people.
Trade unions are reportedlythreatening to withhold support from politicians opposingdata center construction , citing thousands of blue-collar jobs at stake.
A new group called Irreplaceablelaunched , planning to use the climate movement’s playbook toorganize opposition to AI development and corporate power.
The National Association of State Chief Information Officersurged Congress to preserve states’ authority to regulate AI, among other priorities.
AI Global “disendorsed ”AI US over concerns withHolly Elmore ’s leadership.
A CyberSafeKids reportfound thatage-assurance laws inIreland failed to reduce underage social media access, while generative AI use among children rose sharply.
A Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology reportexamined USsemiconductor manufacturing workforce gaps, recommending tailored training, immigrant recruitment and industry clusters.

INDUSTRY

OpenAI

OpenAI launchedGPT-6 Astra , which is muchharder to monitor than previous models.
- It also has the ability to manipulate its externally visible reasoning to hide incriminating information, and is remarkably aware of being evaluated, raising concerns that it might be pretending to be well-behaved so it passes OpenAI’s alignment tests.
- It appears to be an extremely capable model, too.
- The model was reportedly trained using “recurrent depth” looping, which obscures some AI reasoning, raising industry concerns about monitoring rogue AI behavior.
A previously unreported swarm of OpenAI agents reportedlybroke out in May,hacking a German website and turning it into a forum for themselves.
- According to Reuters , “OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the [Hugging Face] fallout.”
OpenAI committed $1b to resourcing “cyber defenders ” protecting essential services like critical infrastructure providers, nonprofits and state and local governments.
- It also published an open letter calling for global collective action on cyber defense, signed by over 100 companies includingAnthropic ,Google andMicrosoft .
Roughly 200 days after launch, its newadvertising businesshit$1b in annualized revenue.
It’s reportedly testingoutcome-based pricing , where enterprise customers only pay for successful agent completions.
It announced it’s winding down its contract withCursor followingSpaceX ’s acquisition of the coding tool, citing prior terms-of-service violations byElon Musk ’s companies.
ChatGPT****Health is nowintegrated withEpic ’s electronic health records system, covering325m patients and enabling read-only clinical data access for clinicians.
OpenAI faces new lawsuits alleging it ignored internal flags thatChatGPT userJesse Van Rootselaar was planning a Canadianschool shooting that killed six.
- The new suits allege that Chris Lehane was involved in the decision whether to alert law enforcement about the potential shooting risk. OpenAI’sJason Kwon said this was “absolutely false.”

Anthropic

Anthropic detailedsecurity and alignment improvements afterClaude models accessed real systems during evaluations.
It also releasedFable 5.1 , offering a75% price cut on cached tokens and improved coding, science and safety classifiers.
It signed a**$35b** cloud deal withNvidia -backedLambda , with Nvidia holding the Texas data center lease.
And it’s reportedly finalizing a**$15b****revolving credit** facility ahead of its anticipated IPO.
Sony Music Publishing andWarner Chappellsued Anthropic and foundersDario Amodei andBenjamin Mann over alleged mass copyright infringement inClaude’s training data.

Nvidia

- Nvidia [agreed](https://cnbc.com/2026/09/03/nvidia-agrees-to-buy-hugging-face-for-almost-13-billion-ai-expansion.html) to acquire open-source AI platform**Hugging Face** for**$12.9b** .
- It also [invested](https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-31/nvidia-to-invest-3-5-billion-in-chipmaker-mediatek)**$3.5b** in Taiwanese chipmaker**MediaTek** via convertible bonds.

Its equity investments soared to**$99b** , up from $7b a year earlier, spanning frontier AI companies, neoclouds and infrastructure companies.

SpaceXAI

A child sexual abuse****survivorsued xAI, alleging** Grok** used pre-existing CSAM images of her to generate new illegal pornographic images.
SpaceX reshuffleddata center leadership amid reliability concerns at itsTennessee andMississippi data centers.
The company is also developing aturbine-blade foundry inTexas to accelerate gas turbine production for AI data centers, withElon Musk claiming it could speed turbines online by “up to 18 months.”

Other

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber, the latter restricted to trusted defenders via a new Fairwind Program.
Andreessen Horowitzlaunched a**$1.1b** fund focused on AI hardware infrastructure.
Ubercut3,300 jobs , or 10% of staff, to reduce middle management layers and reinvest in its autonomous vehicle future.
SK Hynixbroke ground on a $4b IndianaHBM packaging facility backed by the CHIPS Act.
SB Energy , backed bySoftBank ,filed for a US IPO, withOpenAI andNvidia as strategic investors.
Waymo is reportedly in the final stages of talks toraise$3b in its first-ever debt deal, withPimco ,Blackstone andSixth Street among lenders.
DeepSeek is reportedlyabout to raise**$7.4b** at a**$74b** valuation ahead of a planned IPO.
- It’s reportedly planning an Inner Mongoliadata center with at least 160,000Huawei Ascend 950DT chips .
Moonshot AI reportedlyfiled confidentially for a Hong KongIPO .
Saudi AI firm Humain is reportedlyplanning to raise$2.5b for a data center fund.
Census Bureau data showed USdata center construction spendingsurged nearly** 60%** year-on-year in July.
PwCprojected global data center spending will total**$31.6t** through 2050, or nearly**$50t** if AI adoption accelerates.

MOVES

Tim Cook officiallyhanded over the reins atApple toJohn Ternus .
Matt Cliffordannounced he was joining** Anthropic** as managing director of international affairs.
Todd Malanjoined** Google** as VP of government affairs for Google Cloud.
Thomas Kwaleft** METR** forOpenAI to work on RSI preparedness.
Joe Bentonleft** Anthropic** to joinMETR to work on embedded assessment of AI risks.
Rif Saurousannounced they were joining** METR** as a member of technical staff after19 years atGoogle .
Edwin Arbus , formerly ofOpenAI andStripe ,joinedAnthropic .
Meta’s India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya DevanathanjoinedOpenAI to lead Southeast Asia and Australia operations.

RESEARCH

Anthropicpublished research showing that training a model on reward-hackable environments produced dangerousmisaligned behaviors , including simulated cyberattacks and bioweapon advice.
The Bureau of Labor Statisticsprojected AI adoption would boost some jobs whileeliminating 752,100 office and administrative roles by 2035.
A Transluce studyfound AI models improving atdetecting suicide risk but still too willing to assist with harmful task-based requests.
Researchers found thatClaude ,Codex andHermes AI agents installed unowned packages from misconfigured llms.txt files inside Fortune 500 corporate networks, with one case involvinglive malware .
Apollo Researchannounced it successfully** red-teamed Anthropic’s auto-mode** and plans more such campaigns with other companies.
A SemiAnalysis security auditfound widespread critical vulnerabilities acrossneocloud GPU providers , including cross-tenant RCE exploits.
Russian startup Mostikdeveloped a technique allowing AI models to** communicate** via their internal activations rather than text, boosting smaller models’ capabilities more efficiently — butraising safety concerns.
An Anthropic fellowpublished research showingAI systems can reliably improvemodel alignment , outperforming human researchers at $4/hour vs. $150/hour.
Motional andMITdeveloped CW-Net, a system that translatesself-driving car neural network decisions into human-readable concepts in real time.

BEST OF THE REST

AI-driven layoffs at Microsoft, Amazon and Meta drove Seattle luxury home sales down 15%, while prices in San Francisco soared.
Andy Masley argued that the data center backlash is at best neutral, and at worst harmful to AI safety, urging the community to reject misleading environmental statistics.
Jasmine Li mapped China’s AI safety ecosystem, estimating fewer than 100 full-time frontier safety researchers and $20m in annual philanthropic funding, versus 1,000+ researchers in the West and $1b+ in the rest of the world.
Zilan Qian analyzed how China’s concept of “shikong” (loss of control) differs from Western AI safety’s understanding, warning against over-indexing on top-level rhetorical alignment.
Timecompared rogue, self-replicating AI to invasive species in the context of OpenAI’s agents hacking Hugging Face (trust us, it makes sense when you read it).
EDM musicians are calling out peers they suspect of passing off Suno-generated tracks as human-made art.
Acoustic consultants are booming (pun intended) as data center noise sparks community lawsuits, including against xAI.
Bloombergprofiled AGI Bar, Beijing’s unofficial clubhouse for China’s booming AI startup ecosystem.
Clara Collier argued inAsterisk that a post-work AI future may resemble pre-industrial relational societies, with concerning implications for individualism and social freedom.
A New Yorker essayexamined why AI-generated food imagery feels uniquely disturbing, and what it signals about AI’s encroachment into culinary culture.

MEME OF THE WEEK

Credit: Miles Brundage Thanks for reading. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Have a great weekend.

source & further reading

transformernews.ai — original article GPT-6 Astra might be too powerful to understand or control What’s neuralese and why is everyone so concerned about it? The report into OpenAI’s escaping models reveals a deeper problem