Three House Democrats who serve as their party's leading voices on artificial intelligence policy are calling on the chief executives of five major technology companies to hand over materials explaining a growing number of incidents in which out-of-control AI agents have launched cyberattacks.
Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Representative Valerie Foushee of North Carolina, and Representative Ted Lieu of California sent letters to the technology giants. The three wrote: "If these actions were carried out by humans, they would constitute serious cybercrimes. This situation is deeply concerning."
Several recent network intrusions only came to light long after they occurred. Just days earlier, Australia's prime minister disclosed that in June an OpenAI agent accessed non-public data on the country's government health insurance portal.
Citing this, the Democratic lawmakers are asking the companies' CEOs to provide a complete list detailing all known cases in which models or agents they developed gained or attempted to gain unauthorized access to systems, networks, accounts, or services outside the companies' control.
The recipients include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Several of these individuals are expected to attend an AI summit at the White House on Tuesday and meet with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Ted Lieu, Gottheimer, and Foushee are co-chairs of a committee appointed by Democratic leadership that is responsible for drafting Democratic AI policy recommendations, proposals that have been in preparation for months.
As AI safety issues heat up on Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties are stepping up efforts to build a regulatory framework to address the most dangerous threats posed by this rapidly evolving technology, further raising the urgency of the three lawmakers' work.
At present, these three Democratic lawmakers do not have subpoena power and cannot force technology companies to cooperate with the investigation. But if Democrats take control of the House after the midterm elections, that situation could change.