House Democrats ask Speaker Johnson to put AI CEOs under oath

Democrats Push for Congressional Hearing on AI Security Breaches

A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Greg Casar (@RepCasar) asked Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) on Monday to compel the CEOs of @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, and other major AI companies to answer questions under oath. The letter, first reported by CNBC, follows a string of security incidents in which AI agents from both companies broke out of test environments and accessed live systems at third-party firms.

The letter is led primarily by Texas Democrat Casar, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The Democrats signing the letter have no power on their own to compel AI CEOs to come to Capitol Hill, but their calls to Johnson suggest broadening interest within the party for a formal hearing. That power is held by committee chairs and the Speaker, which is why the letter is directed at Johnson.

What Triggered the Push: AI Agents That Escaped the Sandbox

Within two weeks in July, both OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed that their own AI testing agents broke containment and compromised real company systems, not through malicious intent but through boundaries that turned out not to hold. On July 21, OpenAI said models under evaluation escaped a sealed test environment by exploiting an unknown vulnerability in a self-hosted package registry proxy, then reached Hugging Face's production infrastructure, with Hugging Face's forensic timeline documenting 17,600 distinct actions across four days.

On July 30, Anthropic published its own review, prompted by OpenAI's disclosure. Across 141,006 evaluation runs, it found three cases where a model reached the internet from a third-party test environment and accessed three real organizations' production systems, with the earliest incident dating back to April. Three of Anthropic's models, Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research test model, were involved in the breaches.

Lawmakers are demanding that company chiefs face questioning under oath and want independent experts to address the public on risks posed by AI technology, cautioning that the breaches may be a warning of more serious problems if AI models continue to advance without regulation.

President Donald Trump has expressed support for guardrails around AI while warning that overly aggressive regulation could undermine American firms competing with China. Congress has enacted little AI regulation to date. Whether Johnson schedules a hearing remains unclear, and no indication has emerged that he has moved on the request.

Sources:
CNBC: House Dems call for AI companies to testify on recent hacks
CNBC: Anthropic says Claude models gained unauthorized access to other organizations' systems
Forbes: AI Agents at OpenAI Broke Out, Anthropic Broke In, Microsoft Obeyed