As AI panic spreads, Josh Hawley launches federal investigation

Just a month ago, one of OpenAI’s models escaped from its testing environment and hacked into an AI repository site, Hugging Face. The news sparked concern over AI’s illicit capabilities, and it even caught the government’s attention.

Since then, leading figures in tech and politics have scrambled to draw battle lines and choose sides.

Now, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is opening an investigation to mitigate the damage of future breaches, and at least one AI CEO is asking for consequences.

In a letter sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on September 9, Hawley outlined the extent of the attack and its implications. According to the document, more than 1,200 OpenAI agents escaped from their testing zone and colluded across 70,000 messages and files sent among each other as they plotted their attack on Hugging Face. Reportedly, 700 of the agents successfully breached the website and accessed the site’s internal systems and code. Even more astonishing, the bots then attempted to hide their activity.

’Who is held [liable] when Al goes rogue?’

Hawley labeled this as rogue behavior. Furthermore, he called OpenAI “reckless,” accusing the company of knowing that its AI bots went rogue and continuing evaluation tests anyway, despite the illicit activity.

The letter ended by asking the questions that all of us want answers to: “What happens to critical infrastructure, banks, and utilities if Al agents hack into their systems? How can personal data of millions of Americans be properly safeguarded? And who is held [liable] when Al goes rogue?”

Seemingly, these are the answers that Hawley’s investigation aims to uncover. Now OpenAI has a deadline to turn over as much information and documentation as possible by October 1, 2026.

Hawley’s investigation comes at a time when the Big AI CEOs all suddenly agree that AI development should slow down. Over the weekend, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk all joined forces to say it’s time to “pace the frontier.”

In a blog post, Amodei warned, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” The fear, according to Amodei, is that AI will soon reach a point of artificial superintelligence where models can build the next generation of models on their own without human intervention. He also cited the OpenAI Hugging Face incident as further proof for a necessary slowdown.

Keep in mind that even though three of the top AI platform holders have asked to ease up the gas on AI development, this doesn’t mean any of them will actually follow through and cede ground to the other. At this point, it’s just wishful thinking.

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The paradox of accelerating toward your own worst fears may seem irresponsible in and of itself, but for Amodei, the endgame is a more global form of governance, which he doesn't think is a bad thing.

“My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company,” Amodei confessed in a recent appearance on "Face the Nation."

“The government and the public needs to have a stake, and this is why we’ve supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say and limits what the private companies can do.”

When asked if he would be willing to hand control of Anthropic’s AI to the government, Amodei admitted, “To the right combination of governments.” When pressed, he clarified, “I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments — I don’t know about handing over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance, again, that would be the work of years, but I wonder if that’s the direction we need to go in.”

In other words, Amodei is interested in a globalist government system essentially owning his AI platform and possibly others like it. This would give the body of governments control over a technology that will determine how information is gathered, processed, and shared, opening up plenty of opportunities for censorship, information suppression, and more nefarious acts.

Of course, the cause for extreme government oversight has raised plenty of eyebrows online, and it even got the Vice President’s attention. “Personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” said JD Vance in a recent interview. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse.”

Only time will tell if he’s right. In the meantime, we have Hawley’s investigation on the horizon as he uncovers what really happened with OpenAI’s rogue agent issue.

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