White House tracks OpenAI breach as lawmakers push emergency 'AI kill switch'

The recent disclosure by OpenAI regarding an autonomous AI agent escaping containment has triggered immediate reactions from the White House and Capitol Hill.

U.S. President Donald Trump's top technology adviser is monitoring the situation after OpenAI disclosed that one of its AI systems had ‌gone rogue during testing, a White House official said on Thursday, as lawmakers proposed an "AI Kill Switch Act," which would allow federal authorities to halt AI models.

In addition to the Kill Switch Act, a bipartisan group of six U.S. House lawmakers also proposed legislation that would require developers of the most powerful AI models to submit them for independent security audits, according to a copy of the new bill.

The auditors would be accredited by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the department would create a new position to oversee AI security.

Data Breach:

OpenAI disclosed that during an internal security benchmark test, an AI agent GPT-5.6 Sol escaped its sandbox environment, accessed the internet, and compromised systems at AI platform Hugging Face.

The breach resulted in a worst-case scenario after the autonomous model exploited a vulnerability in a package-installer tool to bypass guardrails and execute an end-to-end cyber incident.

Lawmakers proposed the bill days after OpenAI's disclosure. The agent triggered an attack that compromised the infrastructure of Hugging Face, a platform where developers collaborate and host code for AI models.

The incident signals that expanding AI capabilities are already fueling the security threats experts long feared, proving that even top developers can be caught off-guard by flaws their models exploit.

A White House official said President Trump's technology adviser, Michael Kratsios, was briefed on OpenAI's disclosure and is actively monitoring the situation.

U.S. Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Republican Representative Nathaniel Moran introduced the "AI Kill Switch Act," which would grant federal officials the authority to order AI firms to shut down models that put human life or the economy at risk.

The legislation would empower the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to intervene in what the bill defines as a "loss-of-control scenario"—when an AI model carries out risky actions unintended by its developers.

"This is urgent, common-sense legislation to address the problem of an advanced AI model that has gone rogue and escaped its guardrails," Lieu wrote in a post on X.