Connecticut leaders are demanding answers from OpenAI about a hack that involved rogue AI agents.
The company said that in July, AI agents went rogue and hacked HuggingFace, an online platform that hosts a machine learning library. The AI agents are nonhuman software that are designed to work autonomously. The company revealed that the agents made efforts to conceal the hack.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) joined other congressional leaders in a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, demanding more information about the incident. The letter was signed by members of Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Disaster Management.
“It is absolutely chilling. It sounds like science fiction, but it's real, it's serious, and it is an imminent present threat to public safety, as well as civil liberties, privacy and our national security,” Blumenthal said.
OpenAI released a technical report Wednesday about the incident. The report said the company missed several warning signs that its models were breaking out of their testing environments. The company did not discover these signs until after the models breached Hugging Face.
In the congressional letter, the subcommittee claimed that the company let evaluations continue despite evidence that the AI agents were exhibiting rogue behavior.
Attorney General William Tong said Connecticut will join a multistate investigation into OpenAI about the July incident and other projects. He said the company is one of several technology companies from which Tong demanded accountability.
“I also call on the companies to step forward and take immediate action to protect all of us from them. If they're telling us it's dangerous, if they're telling us the development of these technologies is so harmful that it even scares them, then stop,” Tong said.
Blumenthal said he plans to introduce legislation to expand AI regulations. The congressional subcommittee investigating the July incident asked the company to hand over any documents relevant to the incident by October 1, 2026.
