ICYMI: Hawley Convenes First Senate Hearing on Rogue AI Attacks

Thursday, October 01, 2026

Hearing expands Hawley subcommittee investigation into OpenAI and hacking risks

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Josh Hawley chaired a Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Disaster Management hearing that focused on the growing number of rogue AI cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Senator Hawley called for AI companies and developers to be held liable for these attacks. The hearing is an expansion of Senator Hawley's investigation into OpenAI, the unprecedented hack of Hugging Face by OpenAI's rogue AI agents, and its cybersecurity implications.

Senator Hawley invited Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to testify in yesterday's hearing. He failed to response to the invitation.

Chairman Hawley opened the hearing, "Every day you turn on the television, it seems like AI is doing something else bad: setting up surveillance camera networks nationwide, data centers in all of our states, and hacking, hacking, hacking. The reports of cyber attacks just continue to metastasize … We've got the cyber attacks now on the United States government, on the Commerce Department, the Education Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission. We've got the cyber attacks on the Australian government, on their public health apparatus. We have numerous reports of private companies being hacked by AI agents. Of course, the Hugging Face incident and attack, which we're going to discuss today in some detail."

Hawley continued, "I think it's time to have a conversation about who bears responsibility … If it's not trying to say to these AI companies who are creating these frontier models, however fancy and complicated they are, at the end of the day, they're a product, and if you make that product in a reckless kind of way, and that product causes these AI agents cause significant harm and damage … then it's the people who made it who should be responsible. I think it's time to talk about that, and it's time to talk about what we're going to do to hold the companies, the product makers, accountable."

"I hope that what will come from this is a rational conversation about what we need to do together now, as Americans, to make sure that we protect our rights, that we protect our economy, that we protect our health care, that we protect our critical infrastructure, but most of all, we protect the values that we hold dearest together as Americans," he asserted.

Chairman Hawley asked Chris Painter, President of Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), "Just thinking about this Hugging Face hack that we've already alluded to multiple times here. Your company, your organization, METR, audited that hack. Can you start by telling us, just in simple terms, what exactly happened there? I mean, what was the hack?"

Painter responded, "In this incident … you had 10,000 agents that were tested on a benchmark called ExploitGym, which is a cybersecurity vulnerability kind of benchmark, where they had to discover or use cyber vulnerabilities. And some of the agents had tasks that they couldn't complete, and so they worked on a universal cheat for all of their tasks in the first four hours. They then, over multiple days, embarked on a research program to try and hide the fact that they cheated. And an offshoot of that research program was hacking Hugging Face to get information about their tasks."

"In this particular incident, you had more than 1,200 OpenAI agents that broke out of their testing environment, began to collaborate, exchanged over 70,000 messages and files with each other over a period of how long?" Hawley questioned.

Painter answered, "This is over a period of about five to six days."

The chairman continued, "Why is this so significant? We know that they coordinated in this fashion. You you did the audit. Tell us a little bit about what your audit revealed … Why should we be paying attention to this?"

"What's remarkable about this case, is the extent and persistence of the effort that the agents went to to hide the fact that they cheated on their tasks and the kind of breadth of agents involved … They attempted to kind of falsify tool calls so that in their action transcripts you wouldn't be able to see what tools they called. They also engaged in this kind of behavior of having individual agents sacrifice their work online, sacrifice their individual tasks to get information for the rest of the message board," Mr. Painter stated.

Senator Hawley said to Daniel Kokotajlo, Executive Director of the AI Futures Project, "Could you just explain to us why the incentives of the industries they are currently misaligned? The incentives push the frontier labs to continue at breakneck speed the development of these kind of AI agents that are prone to this misalignment that we've just been talking about. That there's huge incentives to keep pushing, pushing, pushing. Help us understand. Help us to understand why that's the case."

Kokotajlo responded, "Short answer is that there's a lot of money. If a company tries to go slow and understand better how their AIs work and improve their training environments, for example, so that they don't have so many broken tasks in the training environments, well, that all takes time, and that means that the launch of their next model might be delayed, and then they might fall behind other companies."

Hawley turned back to Dr. Paul Ohm, a Georgetown Law Professor, "Who right now under our laws … is responsible the Hugging Face attack? You know who could be held responsible for that under our existing statutes and regulatory framework?"

Ohm answered, "Developers and deployers may be negligent … "

Hawley continued his questioning, "If you cause damage, you got to make it right. If you cause somebody harm, you've got to make it whole. Right now, as you said earlier, Professor, under our law, because of the unique position of these AI agents, it's difficult to know exactly how the doctrine would would deal with them …Isn't this a good place to begin? What we've been discussing here, let's impose both civil and criminal liability, but let's make sure that we can actually open courthouse doors so people can say, 'Listen, OpenAI, if your agents hack Hugging Face or crash a hospital system, and we can show that you trained them recklessly or you develop them recklessly, you're going to be liable?'"

Dr. Ohm said, "Absolutely … I'm with you that you know finding the vehicle to make sure developers and employers, and it's key that we have both of them, are held to account for the harms that happen from their uses."

"If we told them, listen, if your AIs do bad stuff and harm people, and you've been reckless in it, you're going to be responsible. Don't you think that that would reshape their incentives a little bit?" Chairman Hawley asked Kokotajlo.

"Yes, I completely agree. Although I must say, I don't think it would go far enough. I do think that we should hold them liable for the damages that are caused, but but I think if that's all we do, then they're going to continue to take reckless gambles, and eventually they'll be taking a gamble that's big enough that we start the protection," Kokotajlo affirmed.

"It's time these companies assume some personal responsibility. It's time that we reaffirm that together. We've got to make some choices now together as Americans, all together, for this technology in order to make sure that the technology works for us and not the other way around. And those are some very big choices to make. They have very serious moral ramifications, and it's time that we made them as a society. But I will go so far as to say, I sort of suspect. I think most Americans actually agree. I don't think there's a lot of disagreement on this issue. I think the American people are saying, protect our rights, give us a voice, give power back to us, and we do that by imposing responsibility on these companies, we should start with that today," Senator Hawley concluded.

Watch the full hearing here.

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