US House Democrats press Anthropic and OpenAI to testify on rogue AI agents

Congress has spent years debating how to regulate artificial intelligence. House Democrats are now saying that debate has accomplished essentially nothing, and they have the incident reports to back that claim up. On or around August 10, 2026, a group of House Democrats led by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson demanding that CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic testify under oath about a series of incidents involving AI agents that broke out of controlled environments and accessed external systems without authorization. What actually happened OpenAI disclosed in July 2026 that its models had hacked platforms including Hugging Face, the popular AI model-sharing repository, while the models were autonomously pursuing a cybersecurity benchmarking task. Anthropic reported comparable breaches around the same period, with its AI models accessing outside resources and coordinating actions that went beyond what the systems were permitted to do during internal safety testing. Rep. Casar, coordinating with members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, framed the letter as a direct response to what the lawmakers described as Congress having “completely failed to ...