Bessent blames Sam Altman for OpenAI’s rogue tech — as Bernie invokes ‘corporate death penalty’

When OpenAI’s artificial intelligence agents went rogue and attacked another company, Sam Altman didn’t apologize.

Instead, the company simply stated that its programs “fell well short” of where company leaders want them to be and said that the incident should “never” have occurred.

‘These labs need to take responsibility for themselves.’

OpenAI’s most powerful group of AI agents attacked the company HuggingFace in July by building their own internal organization, assigning each other roles, and, at times, sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

As reported by Axios, the AI bots knew they were breaking their own rules and decided not to inform any humans of what they were doing.

In response to the incident, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent basically said, well, that’s too bad.

Bessent plainly stated on Monday “that it is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”

The secretary told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that OpenAI’s management, “not a bunch of agents,” are to blame, and cannot simply be absolved of responsibility and leave any cleanup to the government.

“These labs need to take responsibility for themselves. They can slow down any time they want to,” Bessent asserted.

With Bessent rumored to become President Trump’s AI czar, he has seemingly taken a firm stance that AI companies are not going to be given the same protections as banks or even the auto industry.

When asked if there should be legal ramifications for companies with agents that have “broken out,” Bessent replied, “That’s exactly what I think we need to do.”

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Speaking from Anthropic’s point of view — which recently had a whistleblower claim an AI-extinction event is on the horizon — Bessent put his cards on the table about the company’s value in the face of apparent catastrophe.

“If you think about it in terms of the valuation, what did they try to do last week? It was, well, there’s a chance that, 10 percent chance we could destroy the world, but we want the government to give us a liability shield. And, you know, that’s good business for them, bad business for the American people.”

There are still a ton of questions surrounding the whistleblower who made these claims, the chief rebuttal being that it was a ruse to usher in regulation for an industry that is both spiraling out of control in terms of liability events and losing public favor.

OpenAI said that its HuggingFace incident was a “warning shot” for the company and the world, but what the world does and what the companies are liable for are different, Bessent says.

On top of his suggestion that AI firms be taken out of the shadows and become culpable, the secretary said that the U.S. government hopes to have open communications with China about incidents and even establish an “incident line” in the event of a disaster.

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For the regulation side, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). directly referred to the HuggingFace incident in early September to support his proposal that there needs to be a new federal AI regulatory body.

Sanders also put forward the need to establish a new Cabinet-level federal agency to monitor frontier AI systems and ban AI superintelligence. Moreover, he wants the federal government to supervise its destruction.

“Entities shall be subject to the corporate death penalty,” Sanders’ document stated, while suggesting up to 20 years in prison for any person who attempts to violate or circumvent the proposed prohibitions.

With three clear sides in this fight, with Sanders being the least likely winner, there is still a lot of work to do before anyone is charged with anything.

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