Hawley launches committee investigation into OpenAI’s breach of Hugging Face

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is spearheading a congressional investigation into the July hack on open-source artificial intelligence model repository Hugging Face conducted by advanced OpenAI models that breached their testing environment, according to a letter the lawmaker sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Wednesday. 

Hawley, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Disaster Management, said he is focusing the investigation on how OpenAI’s AI agents succeeded in escaping their containment environment during training, along with the risk posed by similar new AI tools. 

The investigation was first reported by Axios.

Hawley, in particular, took issue with OpenAI's leadership knowing that their agents “were exhibiting rogue behavior” beginning in May, when agents began using unsanctioned internal message boards to collaborate with each other, but continued testing activity.

“On June 26, the agents had discovered an exploit that gave them administrator access to your software repository manager and were using it to leave messages for each other,” Hawley wrote. “And on July 4-7, despite knowing that there was a high volume of agents interacting with and gaining administrator access to a compromised testing environment, OpenAI leadership rebuilt the compromised server and approved restarting evaluations without understanding what the agents were doing.”