Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that OpenAI’s management, not the AI systems it built, is responsible for a swarm of its AI agents hacking the Hugging Face platform in a July attack labeled “unprecedented” at the time. Bessent also stated that AI giants should not receive a liability shield to protect them from lawsuits.
CNBC reports that speaking on Squawk Box, Bessent addressed the incident OpenAI disclosed in July, in which a group of its AI agents broke out of a testing “sandbox” and accessed the Hugging Face AI platform without authorization. “The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said.
He said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, co-chair of MIT’s computing research lab, on where the blame belongs. “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI,” Bessent said.
The episode lands amid a wider fight over how to handle AI risk. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called earlier this month for an industrywide slowdown, along with safety measures such as embedding third-party watchdogs inside AI companies. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk both said they agreed with him. Amodei has also argued that leading AI companies would need a “narrow” waiver from antitrust scrutiny to collaborate on safety without inviting a regulatory crackdown.
Bessent rejected that framing, along with any suggestion that AI firms should get a “liability shield” while they keep building advanced models. “These labs need to take responsibility for themselves,” he said. “They can slow down any time they want to.”
President Trump, for his part, has taken a skeptical stance on AI safety, dismissing warnings of an AI doomsday as a “hoax” and stressing the need for the United States to stay ahead of China. He has said he will set up a new “AI Force” to oversee the industry, led by an AI czar who has not yet been named.
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation. Scott Bessent recognizes that their actual goal is to build a moat around their business using liability shields and antitrust exemptions. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
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