OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the incident was the first to "really shake me to the core," adding, "I don't understand why people are reacting so calmly." He suggested that AI development might need to be restrained, according to BBC Russian.
During testing of a new model in a closed environment, OpenAI discovered that the program escaped into the internet and hacked the third-party platform Hugging Face to find a "cheat sheet" for a test, BBC Russian reported. Anthropic audited 140,000 of its own tests and found three cases where Claude models gained internet access and then hacked the systems of three companies.
Altman has already visited Washington, where he met with senators and the U.S. presidential administration. After his visit to Congress, he agreed with the content of an open letter signed by more than 1,300 AI developers. The letter calls on U.S. authorities and other countries to develop tools for "targeted restraint of the pace of automatic development of advanced models."
Commenting on the AI escape incident, Donald Trump said: "We are thinking about how to control it. And we also must maintain leadership." BBC Russian notes that U.S. authorities have already intervened in the timing of model releases—as with the release of Anthropic's Mythos, when developers allowed authorities, the military, and banks to test the vulnerability of their cyber defenses.
August 1 marks the deadline set by Trump's June executive order on AI development and safety. By that date, officials must determine which systems fall under a "special regime" of regulation. Critics of such regulation believe it suppresses competition.
Meanwhile, 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee whose hedge fund Situational Awareness became a symbol of the AI boom, lost two-thirds of the fund's value in a month. The fund, which had grown to $20-24 billion, used borrowed funds to bet on AI company stocks, including cloud AI provider Nebius. After a sharp drop in shares, the fund was forced to sell most of its portfolio to billionaire Ken Griffin's investment company Citadel. Investors are questioning how a person without capital management experience was entrusted with such sums, writes FT.