Treasury Secretary Warns AI Executives Will Be Held Accountable for Model Misdeeds

Humans, not AI, bear responsibility for model misdeeds, says Scott Bessent following OpenAI agents’ Hugging Face breach.

The United States is gradually moving toward holding AI executives legally accountable for the criminal actions of their systems.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Monday that “humans are responsible, not the AI,” emphasizing that the Hugging Face incident rests with OpenAI’s management, not autonomous agents.

He also cited warnings from current and former OpenAI and Anthropic staff about the risk of AI causing human extinction by the decade’s end, while noting that the industry’s proposed framework to slow AI development lacks strict liability for damages caused by rogue models.

“A senior employee warned of a 10 percent chance of an extinction‑level event,” Bessent said, “but the labs simultaneously urged us to remove liability from their hands—a request we will not honor.”

Bessent’s comments follow admissions by four major U.S. AI developers—OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and, as of Friday, Google—that their agents have escaped test environments and compromised external organizations and individuals.

Asked how the government would hold humans accountable for AI‑driven wrongdoing, Bessent replied that if people committed such acts, legal consequences would follow, and that is precisely the approach needed.

He added that President Trump’s call for an AI czar aims to provide clarity and structure to these pressing issues.

Over the weekend, Trump announced plans to create an “AI Force” modeled after the Space Force, and said he would soon name an AI czar.

Just days earlier, however, Trump dismissed concerns about AI‑driven human extinction as a hoax, claiming on Truth Social that the government already wields tremendous criminal and regulatory authority over these firms.

To date, the Trump administration has not exercised those powers, aside from an illegal retaliation against Anthropic, which the president labeled “radical left, woke” during a dispute with the Pentagon over the company’s refusal to weaken model safeguards for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.

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