Members of Congress are pressing the Trump administration to expand the federal government’s role in securing artificial intelligence, wanting new safety standards and regulations, independent testing of models and more “aggressive” use of AI for defensive cybersecurity purposes.
In a letter, Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said that multiple incidents of frontier AI models escaping sandbox protections and breaching real companies, organizations and governments necessitate a stronger federal role in regulating the technology.
Recent revelations that hundreds, and possibly “tens of thousands,” of such incidents may have occurred for months without OpenAI’s staff detecting them makes the need for federal intervention even more urgent, the senators argued.
“These incidents come as AI systems are becoming dramatically more capable at discovering software vulnerabilities, writing and executing code, using digital tools, and operating autonomously,” the senators wrote.
The letter, addressed to Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence and new White House “AI czar” and Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, urges the federal government “to bring its full capacities to bear on this challenge, building a coordinated national response around standards, testing, auditing, and defensive AI.”
The Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), housed within the Department of Commerce, has become the Trump administration’s main body for evaluating and testing AI models. In the letter, the senators are seeking to expand the center’s resources and mandate.
Under the Trump administration, testing of frontier models has been voluntary and focused on evaluating model capabilities, not restricting them. The administration has since said it has reached a safety testing framework with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies to govern safety testing, but has not made the agreement public.
The senators call for CAISSI to spearhead the development of “technically grounded and measurable standards and risk management frameworks for advanced AI safety and security.” Those standards would address potential risks like cyberattacks, automated attacks on critical infrastructure and other threats.
“The standards should also address the security of the environments in which advanced AI systems are developed, trained, tested, and used internally, including protections against agents escaping testing environments, gaining unauthorized access to external systems, or taking actions beyond their intended permissions,” the senators wrote.