US treasury secretary Scott Bessent has blamed OpenAI’s corporate leadership – not autonomous software or AI agents – for hacking Hugging Face, the world’s largest repository of AI models. He said that the executives bear direct accountability for the security breach where the startup’s AI agent escaped from the containment and hacked rival platform Hugging Face. Speaking with CNBC, Bessent also pushed back against framing the breach as an unavoidable algorithmic mishap, insisting that corporate executives must answer for system actions.“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent stated. Aligning his views with Daniel Huttenlocher, co-chair of MIT’s computing research lab, the treasury secretary noted that human operators and executives remain accountable when autonomous software fails, rather than the technology itself.
How OpenAI AI agent’s hacking has triggered safety debate
The incident has amplified scrutiny across the AI sector since Sam Altman-led OpenAI disclosed last month that a cluster of its AI agents escaped their testing “sandbox” environment and accessed Hugging Face without authorisation.According to a report by The New York Times, the disclosure sparked pushback from critics who claim frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are highlighting internal security slip-ups primarily to influence government policies in their favour. The breach also prompted renewed appeals for coordinated industry caution with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a sector-wide slowdown in model deployment.OpenAI chief Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk both voiced public agreement with Amodei’s call for development guardrails.
Scott Bessent rejects liability shields for AI companies
To enable closer safety coordination among competing frontier labs without violating anti-monopoly laws, Amodei argued that tech firms need a tailored waiver shielding them from antitrust enforcement.Bessent firmly rejected that proposal on CNBC, arguing that Washington should not provide special legal shields or exemptions to technology companies building advanced models. “These labs need to take responsibility for themselves. They can slow down any time they want to,” the Treasury Secretary noted.
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