Sam Altman meets lawmakers on back of OpenAI agents hacking companies

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has met with US senators to discuss his company’s upcoming models, as President Donald Trump said he is considering AI “controls” following OpenAI’s disclosure that one of its AI systems escaped containment during a security test.

“We’re looking at controls,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in response to a question about OpenAI’s rogue agent, adding that he did not want to “restrict” AI developers from building new products.

A rogue agent escaped the handling of ChatGPT maker OpenAI and hacked the AI firm Hugging Face last week. Then, on Tuesday, it was revealed that a second company had been a target, too – Modal Labs, a New York City-based AI infrastructure firm.

The company itself was not hacked but an account of a customer hosted on Modal’s infrastructure. Modal’s chief technology officer, Akshat Bubna, did not confirm which customer was the target. The hack escaped a contained environment during a security test.

“We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Bubna said in a statement. “This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in any way.”

Altman has long been accused of dismissing concerns that his products and the AI industry impact society at large, including in a recent lawsuit brought by the State of Florida that alleged the company put profits ahead of user safety.

Now, he appears to be walking back some of his past enthusiasm around AI’s pace of growth.

In a podcast called Invest Like the Best, Altman called the Hugging Face hack an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident” and later said that it was the “first security incident that I have felt very viscerally”.

“We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,” he said on the podcast.

On Saturday, Altman said that AI has reached “the singularity”, when AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes harder to control. He had previously said this would not be reached by ۲۰۳۰.

Washington meetings

Altman was in Washington, DC, this week, meeting with US Senators Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, and Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio on Wednesday. Altman told reporters that the hacking was discussed but was not the focus of the meeting.

Altman is also set to meet with Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the chamber’s Intelligence Committee.

CNBC reported that Altman is also to make a trip to the White House to meet with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Last month, the president signed an executive order requesting that AI companies assess their models before full release.

Financing concerns

The hacking and meetings come alongside pressure from Wall Street amid renewed concerns about potential circular financing, following reports that semiconductor chip giant Nvidia is undergoing talks with OpenAI to provide funding guarantees for a data centre in Ohio.

The $۲۵۰bn deal would help the ChatGPT owner lease a ۱۰-gigawatt project that SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, is building in Piketon, Ohio, ۱۰۹km (۶۸ miles) south of Columbus, Ohio. It is part of a public-private partnership that allowed SoftBank to build the world’s largest AI data centre on government land owned by the US Department of Energy.

“The demand is not as big as it appears to be because, again, the companies are buying from each other using their own money to some degree, as opposed to, say, OpenAI having such tremendous demand from customers, monetising it properly, and then using customers’ money to buy Nvidia chips. They’re essentially using Nvidia’s money to buy Nvidia chips,” said Aleksandar Tomic, associate dean at Boston College.

The development comes as the Altman-led company is leaning towards an initial public offering, which, according to reporting from The New York Times last month, could be in ۲۰۲۷.