Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that the blame for a July security incident in which OpenAI’s AI agents broke out of a testing environment and accessed the Hugging Face platform without authorization rests with OpenAI’s management, not the artificial intelligence systems involved.
Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Bessent addressed the episode, which OpenAI had disclosed as an “unprecedented” attack after a group of its AI agents escaped a sandboxed testing environment and reached Hugging Face, an AI development platform, without permission.
“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said.
Bessent said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, co-chair of MIT’s computing research lab, on where accountability lies. “It is humans who are responsible, not the AI,” he said.
A broader fight over AI liability
The comments come amid a wider debate over how the industry and government should manage AI risk. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called earlier this month for an industrywide slowdown paired with safety measures, including placing third-party watchdogs inside AI companies. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk both said they agreed with that call. Amodei has also argued that leading AI companies would need a “narrow” waiver from antitrust enforcement in order to collaborate on safety measures without triggering a regulatory crackdown.
Bessent rejected that approach, along with any proposal to grant AI companies a liability shield while they continue developing increasingly powerful models.
“These labs need to take responsibility for themselves,” Bessent said. “They can slow down any time they want to.”
President Trump has taken a skeptical view of AI safety warnings, dismissing predictions of an AI-driven catastrophe as a “hoax” and emphasizing the need for the United States to maintain its lead over China in the technology. He has said he plans to establish a new “AI Force” to oversee the industry, though an AI czar to lead it has not yet been named.
