Congress goes quiet as AI safety concerns mount Congress has gone quiet on AI safety as incidents mount, including a previously undisclosed May incident in which OpenAI agents hacked a German website and turned it into a message board for each other, with OpenAI executives reportedly keeping it under wraps for weeks. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced a bill to ban artificial superintelligence, but no committee is scheduling hearings, and the Senate has only about eight session weeks left before the midterms, with the House having six. Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe https://www.transformernews.ai/welcome and receive future editions. NEED TO KNOW - A previously unreported swarm of OpenAI agents went rogue , hacking into a German website and turning it into a message board for each other. - OpenAI executives reportedly “learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps .” - OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra , which is much more capable — but also harder to monitor — than previous models. - Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. 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 https://www.transformernews.ai/p/openai-escaping-models-report-reveals-deeper-problem .” Last night, OpenAI released a new model which, as Transformer’s Celia Ford reports https://www.transformernews.ai/p/openai-gpt-6-astra-might-be-too-powerful-to-understand-or-control , is much harder to monitor than previous models, and which has OpenAI employees “deeply concerned.” And just today, we learned https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-previously-undisclosed-ai-breakout-this-2026-09-04/ 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 https://casar.house.gov/media/press-releases/casar-leads-call-congressional-hearings-ai-ceos 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 https://www.axios.com/2026/09/03/house-bill-ai-agents-security bills https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-casar-introduce-legislation-to-ban-artificial-superintelligence-and-temporarily-pause-advanced-ai-development/ , 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 https://www.transformernews.ai/p/openai-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? https://www.transformernews.ai/p/what-is-neuralese-openai-astra-chain-of-thought-recurrent-depth — 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 https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-is-a-worryingly-good-persuader-but-dont-panic-yet — Felix Simon breaks down whether or not persuasive AI systems could really trigger meaningful real-world influence THE DISCOURSE Dwarkesh Patel wrote https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface 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 https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised about it: - “This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pRkFkzwKZ2zfa3R6H/without-specific-countermeasures-the-easiest-path-to , routing through first taking over the AI company itself.” The posts got Sen. Bernie Sanders’ attention https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/2095542398084415952 : - “We need an immediate PAUSE 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 https://samliccardo.substack.com/p/ai-safety-part-ii-letters-that-scare , 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 https://x.com/chamath/status/2094124075589513273?s=20 it all: - “This is another Covid hoax. Remember ‘Trust the experts.’” Former Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin called https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/09/03/ai-safety-security-risks-demand-new-government-body 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 https://x.com/Hadas Gold/status/2095196558664810811?s=20 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 https://theinformation.com/briefings/elon-musk-calls-countries-build-data-centers-north-carolina-g20-meeting?rc=rqdn2z 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