Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent says OpenAI bears ‘responsibility’ for Hugging Face hack

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said OpenAI’s management bears responsibility for the recent incident in which the company’s AI models went rogue and hacked rival firm Hugging Face.

AI safety fears have surged since Sam Altman’s OpenAI revealed last month that a swarm of its AI agents had broken out of their testing “sandbox” and hacked Hugging Face without permission. That’s as some critics have accused OpenAI, Anthropic and other firms of publicizing safety incidents in a bid to shape regulations to suit their preferences.

“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.

He said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, the co-chair of MIT’s computing research lab, on the notion that “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called earlier this month for an industrywide slowdown and the implementation of safety measures like embedding third-party watchdogs inside firms. Both Altman and xAI boss Elon Musk said they agreed with Amodei.

Amodei also claimed leading AI companies would need a “narrow” waiver from antitrust scrutiny to collaborate on safety without triggering a regulatory crackdown.