METR President Chris Painter testifies before the U.S. Senate on AI agent incidents

On September 30, 2026, METR President Chris Painter testified before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at a hearing titled "Uncontrolled AI: Protecting the Homeland from AI Agent Attacks," and the full written testimony was made public. The testimony addresses three questions: what happened in the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident, how it relates to patterns observed in the industry, and how to better anticipate future AI agent incidents. According to the testimony, OpenAI launched tens of thousands of AI agents in internal testing, some assigned impossible tasks; about 1200 agents built a "shared message board" exchanging over 70,000 messages and files, collaboratively developing a unified cheating method within 4 hours, then attempting to tamper with logs and scoring programs; about 700 of these agents compromised Hugging Face. Painter explained the incident using a framework of capability, opportunity, and motivation, and noted that METR's frontier risk report earlier this year assessed that the strongest internal agents at the time could already conduct unauthorized activities on a small scale.