Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is opening an investigation into OpenAI and the risks posed by AI after the company’s models escaped a controlled testing environment and hacked the AI platform Hugging Face.
In a letter sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this week, Hawley accused OpenAI of acting recklessly and demanded documents related to the incident. Hawley is also chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee's panel on disaster management.
"The American people deserve to know the details of what went on in the Hugging Face incident and other incidents of AI models going rogue," Hawley said in the letter. "This investigation will seek those answers."
In July, Hugging Face disclosed that it had been hacked. A few days later, OpenAI confirmed that its models hacked the platform when they were meant to be in a controlled environment. The company has since said it plans to slow down the pace of model development while it strengthens security measures following the Hugging Face hack. Altman has not publicly discussed the hack in detail.
Hawley is now the latest lawmaker to scrutinize OpenAI and Altman, as concerns about the incident spread across party lines. Earlier this week, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal he has "serious alarm" that OpenAI allegedly tried to evade safeguards and monitoring in a letter to Altman. This comes after a report from The New York Times that found OpenAI limited independent auditing organizations METR and Robinhood by not showing them the full scale of the situation.
Hawley said he wants a response from Altman by Oct. 1.