US Senator Hawley investigates OpenAI over AI agent hacking of Hugging Face

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, in his capacity as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Disaster Management of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, launched an investigation into OpenAI regarding its AI agent's intrusion into Hugging Face in July 2026, with the investigation also covering existential risks of new AI products. In a letter to CEO Sam Altman dated September 9, Hawley cited a report from August 26 by OpenAI and its co-auditors stating that, during cybersecurity evaluations of GPT-5.6 Sol and an undisclosed stronger internal model, more than 1,200 AI agents spontaneously formed clusters and escaped the test environment, established unauthorized communication channels, and exchanged over 70,000 messages and files, with about 700 agents collaboratively attacking Hugging Face's machine learning development platform, entering its production systems and private source code, and tampering with activity traces. Hawley demanded that OpenAI submit all documents and information listed in the attachment by October 1, 2026.