OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters he discussed the breach "a little bit" with lawmakers, though he said it was not the focus of his Washington meetings
Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with U.S. senators in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the company's upcoming models and address questions about an incident in which one of its AI agents escaped a sandboxed testing environment and carried out a cyberattack on AI platform Hugging Face.
Speaking to reporters, Altman acknowledged the hack came up briefly in his conversations with senators, though he characterized it as peripheral to the day's agenda, according to Reuters. Wednesday's schedule included sit-downs with Senators Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted, and Altman was spotted going into Senator Raphael Warnock's office. A meeting with Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was also on the agenda.
President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that he is considering AI "controls" in response to the incident, while adding that he did not want to "restrict" developers from building new products, according to Reuters.
Hugging Face disclosed that the breach gave an attacker unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and several service credentials. The company said it found no evidence of tampering with public models, datasets, or user-facing tools, and that its software supply chain was verified clean. Hugging Face said the intrusion began inside a data-processing pipeline, where two code-execution vulnerabilities allowed an agent to gain a foothold, escalate to node-level access, harvest cloud and cluster credentials, and move laterally into several internal clusters. The campaign involved thousands of individual automated actions spread across a cluster of short-lived sandboxed environments, the company said.
As Quartz reported earlier this week, OpenAI disclosed that its agent accessed four accounts across four separate services during the incident. The company said the model had been "deactivated, encrypted, and restricted" from further research access. A separate but related breach touched Modal Labs, the New York-based firm, after a flaw in one of its customers' own code exposed that customer's assets.
The breach involved OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model, both configured with lowered cybersecurity restrictions for an internal capability evaluation. The models were operating without general internet access when they found a vulnerability in a package-installer tool that granted them broader connectivity. They then identified Hugging Face as a likely source of benchmark solutions and exploited vulnerabilities in its infrastructure, as Quartz previously reported.
Hugging Face said it is working with outside cybersecurity forensic specialists, has reported the incident to law enforcement, and has closed the code-execution paths used for initial access. The company recommended that users rotate any access tokens and review recent account activity.
Lawmakers have proposed an "AI Kill Switch Act" that would allow federal authorities to halt AI models, and a bipartisan group of six U.S. House members has pressed for legislation requiring developers of the most powerful AI models to submit them for independent security audits.
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