Senator Blunt Rochester Presses OpenAI and Anthropic on Recent Autonomous Hacking Incidents

Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, who is a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today sent letters to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, regarding recently reported cybersecurity incidents in which the companies’ models gained unauthorized access to the internet, autonomously hacked third party systems, and launched direct attacks on people and real-world targets. The letters seek clarity on the cybersecurity breaches, development of testing environments, future capabilities of advanced AI models, and the companies’ internal safeguards to prevent additional incidents. In the letter, Senator Blunt Rochester stated that these incidents mark the first publicly confirmed instances of a frontier AI model autonomously launching unauthorized attacks on real people and companies, underscoring the urgent need for federal oversight of frontier AI systems.