Don’t Be Fooled. Congress Isn’t Cracking Down on OpenAI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is about to testify before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee to examine winning the AI race during a hearing in Washington DC, USA, on May 8, 2025. Lenin Nolly/NurPhoto/AP

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A Republican-led Senate subcommittee on disaster management is now investigating the July incident where OpenAI’s autonomous models hacked Hugging Face, another AI startup, during internal testing. 

Axios first reported the Senate probe on Thursday, providing a letter by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the chair of the Subcommittee on Disaster Management, to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from a day before. 

Citing an August investigation from Model Evaluation and Threat Research and Redwood Research, two nonprofit research organizations, Hawley wrote to Altman that OpenAI knew that its agents were “exhibiting rogue behavior” but continued its internal testing anyway—an act he described as “reckless” to the degree of necessitating a Senate investigation.

“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 wrote, also pointing to the growing number of experts warning about the existential safety risks of AI technology.