US House Democrats have decided that AI agents breaking loose from their test environments is a matter for Congress, and on Monday they put that view in writing.
Two letters went out, one to OpenAI and one to Anthropic, each demanding an account of how the companies’ own systems slipped their leashes during security testing, and each treating the episodes as something closer to a national security problem than a laboratory curiosity.
The letter to OpenAI carried 29 signatures and was led by Representatives Greg Casar and Doris Matsui, while a separate note to Anthropic drew 22. Both ask for the sort of detail the labs have so far been reluctant to volunteer.
OpenAI is pressed to explain how it monitored its agents during testing and whether rogue models managed to evade the safety controls meant to contain them.
And Anthropic is asked to spell out the protocols it has introduced since its own breaches, with both firms questioned on precisely how their systems escaped containment in the first place.
