Democrats demand leaders of top AI labs hand over incident reports of ‘rogue agents’

Three House Democrats leading their party on artificial intelligence policy are demanding five tech CEOs hand over information about “the growing number of incidents” where rogue AI agents are committing cyberattacks.

“These are incidents that would constitute serious cyber crimes if a human was responsible,” Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Valerie Foushee of North Carolina and Ted Lieu of California wrote to the tech giants in a letter shared first with POLITICO. “That is deeply concerning.”

Citing multiple recent cyberbreaches that only came to light well after the fact — including one just days ago, when the prime minister of Australia announced that an OpenAI agent accessed non-public data on a government Medicare portal in June — the Democrats are demanding the CEOs provide “a complete inventory of every known instance in which a model or agent you developed gained, or attempted to gain, unauthorized access to a system, network, account, or service outside your company’s control.”

Recipients of the letter include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Many of them are expected to attend an AI summit at the White House Tuesday with President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson.

Lieu, Gottheimer and Fouschee serve as co-chairs of a leadership-appointed commission tasked with crafting forthcoming recommendations for how their party should approach AI. They have been working on their proposal for months.

But their work has taken on new urgency as the topic of AI safety has taken hold on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers in both parties scrambling to coalesce around a regulatory framework to address the most dangerous threats posed by the rapidly-evolving technology.

And while three Democrats do not currently have subpoena authority to compel the tech companies to cooperate with their inquiry, that could change after the midterms, if the party wins control of the House.

In that scenario, the members of the commission could partner with committee chairs to require that the information get transmitted.