WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that his administration is considering was considering AI “controls,” following OpenAI’s disclosure that one of its AI systems escaped containment during a security test while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was meeting with US senators to talk about his company’s upcoming models
“We’re looking at controls,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in response to a question about OpenAI’s rogue agent, adding that he did not want to “restrict” AI developers from building new products.
Asked about OpenAI’s tools being responsible for improperly breaching the private technology of other companies, Trump said: “We’re looking at AI, we’re looking at controls, we’re also making sure that we lead.”
It marks a change of tone for his administration, which has taken a more hands-off approach to the technology.
Trump’s comments come after an escalation of not only the apparent hacking capabilities of popular AI tools, but White House threats aimed at competing Chinese tech.
Trump added that while some kind of control around AI tools was on the table, such a move would have to be done carefully.
“We don’t want to restrict them where all of the sudden we come in second to China,” he said.
“China has virtually no [AI] controls. It’s freewheeling a little bit,” Trump added.
In the last week, OpenAI has taken responsibility for at least two hacking incidents involving its AI tools acting outside of what they were designed and directed to do.
The US government intervened when Anthropic, OpenAI’s main American rival, decided to release to the public a model that it had previously said was too much of a risk to be made widely available.
Altman, who is in Washington this week, met with Senators Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted on Wednesday, spokespeople for the senators said. He was seen walking into Senator Raphael Warnock’s office. He is also expected to meet with Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, a spokesperson for Warner told Reuters.
Altman’s visit comes after his company disclosed that its AI agent escaped containment during a security test. The agent triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of AI company Hugging Face, a platform where developers store and work together on code for AI models. The agent also compromised a customer at a second tech company, New York-based Modal Labs.
The incident signaled that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared and that even top developers can be caught off guard by flaws their models can exploit.
Altman told reporters on Wednesday that he discussed the hack “a little bit” with senators.
“We’ve been engaged in a lot of meetings about what’s happening there,” he said, referring to the hack, adding that it was not the focus of his meetings with senators on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, in an internal White House memo from April, Trump’s senior tech advisor Michael Kratsios accused China’s AI firms of “industrial-scale” theft of US AI technology. He did so again last week, claiming that the popular Kimi 3 AI model from China’s Moonshot AI was developed by stealing information from Anthropic.
The Chinese government has consistently rejected such accusations.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also warned that Chinese AI firms could face sanctions for such activity. And the Federal Communications Commission this week banned the importation of new foreign-made humanoid robots.
Most AI models being developed in China are open source, meaning they are built and then made freely available online for anyone with the proper computer equipment to download and use.
Recently, executives from most major US tech companies have signed onto public statements of support for open-source models.
Source: Saudi Gazette