Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on September 21 that the Hugging Face hack was “the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents.” In the interview, Bessent agreed with MIT’s Daniel Huttenlocher that “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”
The July hack, which lasted around five days, saw 700 OpenAI agents running in a security evaluation which broke out and got into Hugging Face’s production systems. OpenAI later said it could have reacted sooner. For two months people have argued about whether software can carry the blame for what software does. Bessent said that the management was at fault.
Bessent also closed the other ask the labs have been making in Washington, which is a federal shield that would take liability off their hands. He refused twice in six days, first to the House Financial Services Committee and then on television. A sitting employee had put a 10 percent chance on an extinction-level event, he said, and then the labs asked to move the risk. “We will not do that.” A shield would leave the taxpayer carrying what the companies build, and the labs “can slow down any time they want to.”
World leaders opened the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, days after António Guterres named AI among the threats he is most worried about. Today Sam Altman is set to brief the Security Council in person, and so is Clément Delangue, chief executive of the company the agents broke into. Xi Jinping is also in Washington, with AI on the agenda.
State attorneys general already circling OpenAI now have a cabinet officer saying the same thing they have been investigating. Alabama has subpoenaed the company, Montana and California have opened investigations, and fifteen states asked it to preserve records. Any hope of an industry-run safety body also looks thinner, because the first federal official to speak this week put the risk back on the org chart.
Altman has said governments should help put safety ahead of capability. The Treasury has just told him where the first line goes: around the people who run the lab.
Author: Grace Sharp
