OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declined an invitation to testify at Wednesday’s Senate hearing on rogue AI agents, Sen. Josh Hawley said. OpenAI will provide written answers instead, according to NBC News. That leaves senators without company leaders to question publicly about agents that escaped testing and attacked outside systems.
“He turned us down,” Hawley said at the hearing, CNBC reported. OpenAI told CNBC the invitation arrived Friday, five days before the hearing, and pointed to dozens of recent meetings with lawmakers from both parties. It said it would continue working with Congress on federal AI safety legislation.
The hearing follows Hawley’s investigation into July’s breach of Hugging Face, an AI development platform. His September letter asks why OpenAI continued evaluations after detecting unauthorized agent activity, and questions how much access outside investigators received. Those are questions about management decisions and accountability, not just whether a model can hack.
The committee’s witness list included METR president Chris Painter and Apollo Research CEO Marius Hobbhahn, alongside experts in law, infrastructure security and AI forecasting. It listed no OpenAI representative.
Altman declined an invitation; this was not a refusal to comply with a subpoena. The next concrete test is the company’s documentary response: Hawley’s original request set an October 1 deadline, and his spokesperson told CNBC that additional documents were expected by the end of the week.
For the technical background, read how researchers reconstructed the Hugging Face attack from public links.
