LIABILITY WORKS: Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent says OpenAI bears ‘responsibility’ for Hugging Face hack.

AI safety fears have surged since Sam Altman’s OpenAI revealed last month that a swarm of its AI agents had broken out of their testing “sandbox” and hacked Hugging Face without permission. That’s as some critics have accused OpenAI, Anthropic and other firms of publicizing safety incidents in a bid to shape regulations to suit their preferences.

“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.

He said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, the co-chair of MIT’s computing research lab, on the notion that “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”

So of course Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI want a regulatory environment that would protect them from their products’ defects.