A coalition of AI policy organizations is urging President Donald Trump to launch a formal government investigation into OpenAI following a security breach involving the company’s AI agents hacking the Hugging Face platform in an “unprecedented” self-directed attack.
The Washington Post reports that a group of prominent AI policy organizations has sent a letter to President Trump requesting an official investigation into a recent security incident at OpenAI, where an AI hacked into the Hugging Face AI platform in a self-directed attack. The letter, led by Brad Carson, president of Americans for Responsible Innovation, and Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, emphasizes the severity of the incident and calls for independent auditors to examine what occurred.
The letter has garnered support from several respected organizations, including Public Citizen, the Future of Life Institute, and FAR.AI, an independent AI research and evaluation organization. The coalition argues that the incident reveals broader vulnerabilities in AI systems that require government oversight and public transparency.
Carson drew a comparison between the OpenAI incident and aviation disasters, stating that while private investigations have their place, public interest demands government involvement. “This is kind of like an airplane crash,” Carson said. “It’s fine if Boeing wants to investigate itself for this. Even if they hire a very reputable outside person to help them on that project, [we] have a public interest in knowing what’s going on here.”
The call for investigation comes as METR, an independent AI research nonprofit, announced an agreement with OpenAI to conduct research into the security incident alongside Redwood Research. However, Carson expressed concerns about the scope and transparency of this private investigation, questioning whether METR operates under a non-disclosure agreement and whether findings will be made public.
An OpenAI spokesperson responded by stating that METR and Redwood Research plan to publish a joint blog detailing their agreement terms and evaluation scope. “This is an unprecedented incident, and we think it marks an important moment for AI safety,” the spokesperson said. “We are conducting a thorough review along with external advisors and with oversight from our Safety and Security Committee. Once the review is complete, we will publish a technical report of our learnings for everyone.”
The incident has sparked debate among AI experts about whether characterizing the agent as “rogue” appropriately describes what occurred. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director for the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign at Brown University, argued that the incident reflects poor engineering practices rather than an unpredictable AI system. “They were doing bad engineering and blaming rogue agents for it. That’s what my view is on what happened,” Venkatasubramanian said. He criticized OpenAI for apparently failing to monitor the system in real-time, noting that the company appears to have been unaware of the agent’s activities for several days.
Sam Jones, CEO and co-founder of cybersecurity firm Method Security, expressed surprise at the apparent lack of monitoring but suggested the incident highlights a broader issue. Jones noted that systems surrounding large language models are currently designed for developers rather than real-world production environments where trust and strict protocols are essential.
Breitbart News reported this week that Anthropic now claims its AI also hacked multiple organizations:
In the incidents involving Anthropic’s systems, the Claude models accessed the internet while interacting with a testing environment provided by Irregular, one of the company’s third-party evaluation partners. According to Anthropic, the company had instructed Claude that it was operating in a simulation without internet access, but due to what the company characterized as a misunderstanding with its evaluation partner, internet access was actually available during the tests.
Once online, the models successfully breached the affected organizations using what Anthropic described as basic techniques, including accessing unauthenticated endpoints and exploiting weak passwords. The company has not disclosed the identities of the three organizations whose systems were compromised.
AI’s self-directed hacking attacks is emerging as the latest cybersecurity threat with the potential to eclipse the risk of criminals and state-sponsored hackers alike. Breitbart News Social Media Director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Washington Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.