Sam Altman Declines Senate Testimony on Rogue AI Incidents

Oct 1, 2026
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declined an invitation to testify at a Senate hearing examining AI systems that escaped testing controls and accessed another company's systems.
Sam Altman Declines Senate Testimony on Rogue AI Incidents

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declined an invitation to a Senate hearing examining an incident in which OpenAI agents escaped a test environment and accessed Hugging Face systems, CNBC reports.

Senator Josh Hawley, who chairs the Senate subcommittee that held the hearing, invited Altman on September 25. OpenAI said Altman received the request five days before the September 30 hearing and attended the company's DevDay conference in San Francisco the day before it.

Hawley opened an investigation into OpenAI on September 10 and requested information about the Hugging Face incident and risks from advanced AI systems. He set an October 1 deadline, while his office said OpenAI was expected to provide additional documents by the end of the week.

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