This week's chatter on AI's existential threat bled into questions House Financial Services Committee members asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday.

Bessent said the Treasury Department has been focused on artificial-intelligence safety since the limited release of Claude's Mythos models. "What we shouldn't do is give these labs a liability exemption, which is what they are asking for," Bessent said. "The best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate."

-- On AI labs going public amid the existential risks recently mentioned, Bessent said: "I think the liabilities have to be very well outlined in the S1 and in the prospectus, and as a former investor and now in the public sector, I'm not sure how one would quantify that."

-- Lawmakers asked Bessent how he's been thinking about balancing safe AI development against the global competition to dominate the industry. He did not provide details on how AI safety rules might be coordinated with other countries.

-- On competition, Bessent pointed to the open source. "We need to develop more open source models in the U.S," he said. "We can't let these large labs have regulatory capture because that will stop innovation."

-- Asked if there was any regulation he would support in light of the recent Hugging Face hack, Bessent said: "I haven't seen anything yet."