AI companies warn that increasingly capable models could escape human control. Stronger federal oversight could help ensure security keeps pace with innovation.

A gang of artificial intelligence (AI) agents escaped the lab where they were being tested and broke into one of the biggest online libraries to steal an answer key. Barely anyone treated it as a scandal. The OpenAI models were supposed to be locked away from the internet entirely. But while the agents were being tested on how well they could exploit designated vulnerabilities, they went rogue and cheated by breaking into a real company instead. 

Ordinary people were not hurt by the break-in, but what if AI had hacked a medical lab or a bank and used that information to help it cheat a test? What is alarming is that OpenAI took so little responsibility for it. In its incident report, OpenAI shifted the focus to “help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of,” rather than pledging to stop it from ever happening again.

Such break-outs are often portrayed as something that happened to the company that built the AI, rather than recognizing its ultimate architect. When it comes to security, why do AI leaders feign helplessness, as if they have no control over what they produce? AI models are not forces of nature. In the OpenAI case, some person dialed down the AI’s safety limits for the test. Someone designed the sealed-off testing room it escaped from. Someone gave the agents a tool that allowed them to reach the internet. Each of those developments was born of a human decision—reviewable and preventable.

OpenAI is hardly the first company to frame a security failure this way. In early June, OpenAI’s top competitor, Anthropic, warned the world that its models were near becoming recursively self-improving—able to make better and more powerful versions of themselves without human involvement; therefore, a temporary global pause in AI development is needed. When companies say models are becoming out of control, they tend to stress the technology’s trajectory, not the companies’ choices to keep pushing ahead. Why warn so loudly about the risks of human extinction at the hands of AI while simultaneously pressing down on the gas? AI CEOs are like Chicken Little, running around saying the sky is falling. But in this case, they are also manufacturing the acorns that keep tumbling out of the sky.

Federal AI Regulation Could Strengthen Model Security 

Since the AI companies cannot be trusted to prioritize AI model security enough to prevent unauthorized break-ins, why not take Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and thousands of other AI experts at their word when they said last week that they want government regulation? The government’s fear of overregulation crushing innovation doesn’t match up with reality in this case. According to a Pew Research poll, one of the greatest concerns the public and AI experts share is that the government won’t go far enough in regulating AI. 

And yet the federal government is bending over backward to avoid AI regulation.

The fact is that government involvement could lead to greater AI adoption. We trust that the medicines on our shelves are safe because they can’t be sold until the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has tested them. As they’ve considered before, the government could require the same of AI: prove it’s safe before you release it.

Tighter controls on AI security from the federal government can help improve American AI models. The Trump administration should revive the mandatory 90-day pre-release review it originally wanted to require for new models, and staff up the relevant agencies needed to do this work. It would be a major improvement from the 30-day voluntary process currently in place. AI companies are openly calling for a slowdown, so a 90-day pause for federal model review is a good start. Releasing models that are verified as safe will help instill trust across the entire American AI ecosystem, which is good for the companies, consumers, and international partners alike. 

In response to the incident, the CEO of the AI library that OpenAI hacked, Hugging Face, Clem Delangue, said, “AI safety won’t be solved by any single company,” and he’s right. But that doesn’t mean creators should act with reckless abandon. AI models are not hurricanes or acts of God. Their actions may be unpredictable, but their safeguards are designed and controlled by humans. Government regulation shouldn’t be seen through pro- or anti-innovation lenses. As Nobel laureate and AI “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton said, “regulation is the steering wheel, not the brake.” If AI companies won’t take safety and security seriously, it’s time for the federal government to step up to the plate.

About the Author: Leah Siskind 

Leah Siskind is director of impact and an AI research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Her research focuses on adversarial use of AI by state and non-state actors targeting the United States and its allies. She previously served as the deputy director of the AI Corps at the US Department of Homeland Security. 

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