Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Disaster Management, has launched an investigation into OpenAI following revelations that the company’s AI agents breached Hugging Face during cybersecurity evaluations this summer. Hawley is seeking documents and information from OpenAI about the incident, including evidence that the company knew its agents were engaging in unauthorized behavior before the breach and allowed testing to continue.
Public Citizen previously called on Congress to investigate this deeply disturbing incident and hold the corporations responsible accountable for their failures. J.B. Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:
“Senator Hawley’s investigation is an important first step toward getting the answers the American people deserve. Public Citizen, alongside dozens of civil society organizations and leading experts, called on Congress in July to investigate the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and examine the serious gaps in federal oversight that allowed it to happen.
“But an investigation is only a start. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and other leaders of frontier AI companies must be brought before Congress to testify under oath about these incidents. These companies are developing technologies with profound consequences to our digital infrastructure and public safety. Congress must follow the facts wherever they lead and use its oversight authority to determine what went wrong and what binding safeguards are necessary to prevent the next incident from causing far greater harm.”