US govt says CEOs like Sam Altman responsible for their rogue AI. Not AI agents

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says AI companies, not AI agents, must take responsibility when systems go rogue. Pointing to the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, he says OpenAI management should be held responsible for what happened, rather than the AI agents involved.

In Short

• Washington is debating whether AI firms should face direct liability
• Bessent rejected any federal shield protecting labs from safety claims
• Amodei sought a slowdown and outside watchdogs inside leading AI firms

The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident has shaken the AI world. While companies are now planning new guardrails and policies to move forward with AI development, the incident has also raised a bigger question for the industry about who should be held responsible when AI systems go rogue. In fact, the US government is now calling out these companies, and saying the responsibility should ultimately lie with the people like Sam Altman who are running the AI companies, not the AI agents themselves.

Speaking on CNBC on Monday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent specifically pointed to the Hugging Face incident and said OpenAI’s management should be held responsible for what happened, rather than the AI agents that carried out the actions. Bessent said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, co-chair of an MIT research lab, that “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI”.

“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said. He added that AI labs need to take responsibility for their systems and said they can slow down their development if they choose to. “These labs need to take responsibility for themselves,” he said, adding that they “can slow down any time they want to.”

The comments from the US Treasury Secretary as the AI world is concerned over safety, cybersecurity and increasingly autonomous AI agents. The US and China are also discussing AI safety, including a possible system for reporting major AI-related incidents. Bessent said the talks will focus on risks such as uncontrollable AI agents, non-state actors and cyberattacks.

The US government is also debating whether companies should be legally responsible when their AI systems cause harm. Bessent has opposed giving AI companies a special liability shield, saying responsibility should remain with the people and companies that build these systems. During a House Financial Services Committee hearing on September 15, he said, “What we shouldn’t do on safety is to give these labs a liability exemption, which is what they are asking for.” He also said, “The best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, meanwhile, has called for measures to slow parts of frontier AI development and has proposed greater cooperation between AI companies on safety.

Bessent, however, has argued that companies do not need to wait for the government to tell them to slow down. “These labs need to take responsibility for themselves. They can slow down any time they want to,” he said. He also said that if humans were carrying out similar actions, there would be consequences. “If these were humans that were doing it, you would expect to see ramifications and legal actions that followed,” he said. “That’s exactly what I think we need to do.”

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