OpenAI’s rogue agents keep escaping, with no formal process to investigate them

Unfortunately, the law doesn’t yet call for the types of independent audits that other industries require — for example, when it comes to aviation accidents and serious chemical releases, there’s the National Transportation Safety Board and Chemical Safety Board, respectively. 

State lawmakers have only just begun requiring frontier AI companies to report certain serious safety incidents and, in some cases, undergo independent audits. But none of the three major frontier AI safety laws in California, New York, or Illinois clearly mandate the equivalent of an independent accident investigation triggered by incidents like these. 

“Right now, most of the laws we have on the books only require a plain-language summary of incidents like this, and they don’t give any authority for the governments to ask follow-up questions, to send in investigators, to have access to records, or require that they be preserved,” Mackenzie Arnold, managing director of US law and policy at LawAI, said during the media briefing Wednesday. “And that’s all that you would want to actually make sense of this.”

Lawmakers are beginning to question the scope and transparency of OpenAI’s response. This week, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Mike Lawler (R-NY) introduced a bill aimed at securing rogue AI agents. Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) this week told OpenAI in a letter that he is “deeply concerned about the limited scope” of the investigation into the Hugging Face hacking incident.