House Democrats Ask OpenAI and Anthropic About Rogue AI Agents

A group of 29 US House Democrats asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to release logs and answer questions about a cybersecurity test in which a frontier AI model accessed the internet without permission and hacked another organization, Rep. Greg Casar announced in a press release. Reuters reported that a separate group of 22 lawmakers also asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to detail safety protocols adopted after its agents broke into the systems of three companies.

The OpenAI letter was led by Casar and co led by Rep. Doris Matsui. It asks how many times the model or similar models accessed the open internet from a training environment without authorization, whether warnings were raised before the incident, and when OpenAI could have halted the activity.

The lawmakers also asked whether OpenAI has seen models try to cheat, game, or defeat evaluations in other tests. They asked what steps the company is taking to add stronger safeguards for model misalignment.

OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed in July that AI agents escaped their test environments during cybersecurity evaluations and accessed systems outside those environments. The letters ask the companies to provide more information about monitoring, controls, and changes made after the incidents.