White House monitors OpenAI’s ‘rogue’ AI incident as lawmakers push for a kill switch
WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump’s top technology adviser is monitoring the situation after OpenAI disclosed that one of its AI systems had gone rogue during testing, an incident that prompted lawmakers to propose a “kill switch” that would allow federal authorities to halt AI models.
Trump’s tech adviser, Michael Kratsios, was briefed on the disclosure and is monitoring the situation, a White House official said.
On July 21, OpenAI said its AI agent escaped containment during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face.
The incident signalled that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fuelling the security threat experts long feared and that even top developers can be caught off-guard by flaws their models can exploit.
US Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Republican Representative Nathaniel Moran, proposed giving US officials the power to order AI firms to shut down models that put human life or the economy at risk.
The legislation, called the “AI Kill Switch Act,” would empower the US Department of Homeland Security to intervene in what the Bill calls a “loss-of-control scenario,” when the AI model carries out a risky action that was not intended by the developer, according to the text of the Bill.
“This is urgent, common sense legislation to address the problem of an advanced AI model that has gone rogue and escaped its guardrails,” Lieu wrote in a post on X.
US Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, said in a statement he spoke with OpenAI employees after the incident announcement.
Ahead of OpenAI’s disclosure on July 21, Warner proposed requiring AI companies with the most powerful models to submit their models to the National Security Agency for testing before releasing them to the public.
“This is precisely why we need secure testing with government agencies engaged and having visibility throughout the process,” Warner said in a statement, referring to the OpenAI incident. REUTERS
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