Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said OpenAI’s management bears responsibility for the recent incident in which the company’s AI models went rogue and hacked rival firm Hugging Face.
AI safety fears have surged since Sam Altman’s OpenAI revealed last month that a swarm of its AI agents had broken out of their testing “sandbox” and hacked Hugging Face without permission. That’s as some critics have accused OpenAI, Anthropic and other firms of publicizing safety incidents in a bid to shape regulations to suit their preferences.
“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.
He said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, the co-chair of MIT’s computing research lab, on the notion that “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called earlier this month for an industrywide slowdown and the implementation of safety measures like embedding third-party watchdogs inside firms. Both Altman and xAI boss Elon Musk said they agreed with Amodei.
Amodei also claimed leading AI companies would need a “narrow” waiver from antitrust scrutiny to collaborate on safety without triggering a regulatory crackdown.
Bessent pushed back on that approach during his CNBC appearance, stating he was against the idea of the federal government granting AI companies some kind of “liability shield” while building advanced models.
“These labs need to take responsibility for themselves,” the treasury secretary said. “They can slow down any time they want to.”
OpenAI did not immediately return The Post’s request for comment.
An alarming research report on the Hugging Face hack last month was co-written by AI safety firms METR and Redwood Research — each of which has faced scrutiny over their close ties to Effective Altruism and key Anthropic investors, as The Post reported.
President Trump has emerged as one of the biggest skeptics in the AI safety debate, arguing that warnings of a potential AI doomsday are a “hoax” and that the US needs to maintain a lead in the industry over China.
Trump said he will create a new “AI Force,” led by a still-unnamed AI “czar,” to oversee the industry. Bessent said the czar would play a key role in the debate, which he described as “very important.”