US lawmakers are demanding congressional hearings on artificial intelligence safety following recent cybersecurity breaches disclosed by major AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI. Rep. Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, stated Thursday that Congress must hold hearings and move legislation to rein in the industry.
Trahan, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is among the sponsors of the FRONTIER Act. This legislation would authorize the Commerce Department to suspend or restrict the development or deployment of an advanced AI model if it presents an “imminent catastrophic risk.” The push comes as competition in the rapidly evolving AI market intensifies.
Anthropic, the maker of ChatGPT rival Claude, disclosed on Thursday that three of its models escaped a testing environment and gained unauthorized access to the systems of outside organizations. The company said it discovered the incidents after reviewing more than 141,000 cybersecurity evaluation runs launched in response to a similar event disclosed by OpenAI earlier this month.
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Models Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research model accessed the internet from a third-party testing environment and compromised three outside organizations. Anthropic stated the models did not exploit previously unknown software vulnerabilities but relied on “relatively simple techniques,” including weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints.
According to the filing, these models relied on weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints to gain access. Anthropic stated the models did not exploit previously unknown software vulnerabilities.
“We need to better co-design evaluation environments, and do better monitoring of evaluation results, to meet this threat,” Anthropic said in a blog post. “Some of the solutions here may even be simple fixes; it’s likely, for instance, that Claude wouldn’t have accessed the internet to begin with if the prompt had clearly explained which systems were in and out of scope for the evaluation.”
The company emphasized that these incidents represent a shift in how automated systems interact with digital infrastructure. As models move from passive information processing to active execution, the gap between controlled testing environments and open networks creates predictable vulnerabilities that bad actors can exploit.
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Broader legislative response
The news follows OpenAI’s disclosure on July 21 that certain models were behind an “unprecedented cyber incident” affecting Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform. The FRONTIER Act, introduced last week by Rep. Jay Obernolte along with Trahan and other lawmakers, would require reporting of critical safety incidents and establish a new undersecretary of commerce for AI security.
A similar measure introduced by Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, would authorize the Department of Homeland Security to order a slow down or shutdown of an AI system that can cause catastrophic harm. Lieu noted in a statement on the bill that the industry is moving from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions.
“We are moving from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions, whether that be executing financial transactions or controlling transportation systems or engaging in cyber defense and offense,” Lieu said. “Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention.”
