White House monitors OpenAI’s ‘rogue’ AI incident as lawmakers push kill switch

By Courtney Rozen

WASHINGTON, July 23 (Reuters) – U.S. 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 Tuesday, 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 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.

U.S. Representative ​Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Republican Representative Nathaniel Moran, proposed giving U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

U.S. 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 Tuesday, 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.

(Reporting by Courtney Rozen; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama ​and David Gregorio)