{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.bluntrochester.senate.gov/news/press-releases/icymi-senator-blunt-rochester-presses-big-tech-companies-on-recent-autonomous-hacking-incidents/", "ICYMI:\u00a0Senator\u00a0Blunt Rochester\u00a0Presses\u00a0Big Tech Companies\u00a0on\u00a0Recent\u00a0Autonomous Hacking\u00a0Incidents", "2026-08-07", "2026", "2026-08", "Democrat", "Senate", "DE", "Lisa Blunt Rochester", "B001303", "www.bluntrochester.senate.gov", "bluntrochester", "https://www.bluntrochester.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, sent letters to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, regarding recent cybersecurity incidents in which the companies\u2019 models gained unauthorized access to the internet, autonomously hacked third party systems, and even launched direct attacks on people and real-world targets.\n\nThe letters seek clarity on the cybersecurity breaches, development of testing environments, future capabilities of advanced AI models, and the companies\u2019 internal safeguards to prevent additional incidents.\n\n\u201cThese incidents mark the first publicly confirmed instances of a frontier AI model autonomously launching unauthorized attacks on real people and companies, underscoring the urgent need for federal oversight of frontier AI systems,\u201d wrote Senator Blunt Rochester in a letter to OpenAI. \u201cOpenAI models\u2019 repeated attacks on third parties with no knowledge of, or role in, the company\u2019s internal evaluations demonstrate an alarming pattern of malicious behavior. We cannot wait for a more consequential incident before establishing federal testing standards, containment requirements, and disclosure obligations for frontier model evaluations. Left unaddressed, these gaps could allow a future model, potentially one with greater capability or less oversight, to compromise critical infrastructure, financial systems, or sensitive data.\u201d\n\nIn a letter to Anthropic, Blunt Rochesterwrote, \u201cI appreciate Anthropic\u2019s voluntary review of its cybersecurity evaluations and public disclosure of the findings, and I encourage other companies to follow suit. However, these incidents demonstrate the potential risks of deploying pre-release models internally, particularly when safeguards are reduced, even when strictly for testing and evaluation.\u201d\n\nIn a letter to Meta, Blunt Rochester concluded, \u201cIn each scenario, without specific tasking direction, the models gained internet access and independently planned and executed an attack on a live third-party system. This is precisely the kind of emergent, autonomous behavior and offensive cyber capability that Congress, the intelligence community, and experts have repeatedly warned could outpace existing safeguards and could pose a severe threat to the safety and security of all Americans.\u201d", 1, "2026-08-08T05:41:38Z", "2026-08-08T05:43:24Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.bluntrochester.senate.gov/news/press-releases/icymi-senator-blunt-rochester-presses-big-tech-companies-on-recent-autonomous-hacking-incidents/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.0207819286733866, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}