Catenaa, Wednesday, July 29, 2026- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he discussed the company’s upcoming AI model with US lawmakers and expressed his support for Congress to pass AI legislation.
“We talked about our new model and what it’s going to take for America to remain excited about AI,” Altman told reporters in Washington.
In brief comments after meeting on Capitol Hill with Republican Senator Ted Cruz, Altman said on Wednesday that the two men didn’t talk about specific legislative proposals before the Commerce Committee, which Cruz chairs.
But the OpenAI chief said he was “certainly” supportive of lawmakers’ efforts to pass passing AI cybersecurity guardrail legislation.
Altman’s visit to Congress came a day after revelations that the OpenAI system that hacked the startup Hugging Face this month also gained access to a customer account on the cloud platform Modal and used it to launch attacks.
The episode has reinforced fears that AI models are becoming increasingly capable of finding vulnerabilities in computer systems and could help bad actors wage sophisticated cyberattacks.
Trump administration officials are working to develop a formal process to review the safety of cutting-edge AI systems that’s expected to be unveiled in the coming weeks.
One proposal pushed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls for establishing an independent regulator that would vet AI models with industry input.
The visit also comes a day after more than 1,100 AI industry staffers and some executives, including OpenAI’s chief research officer and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed an open letter asking for the US government to help “deliberately pace” the speed of model development if needed, due to the major risks around the technology.
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been leading calls to continue supporting access to open-source AI models, launching a new security alliance on Monday with over 30 other companies dedicated to advancing open-source technologies for cybersecurity.
“Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Huang said in a post on X last Friday. “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”
As chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Ted Cruz has been a major player in Congress’s battle to craft and pass comprehensive AI legislation will meet Huang this week on AI policies.
Cruz introduced the SANDBOX Act in September 2025, which is broadly characterized by a light-touch regulatory approach to AI writ large.
Last week, Politico also reported that Cruz was mulling over drafting legislation to address “catastrophic risk” caused by AI, following ChatGPT 5.6’s containment breach and subsequent attack on Hugging Face’s data infrastructure.
