Bipartisan senators ask national security officials to address AI threats - Spectrum News

WASHINGTON — A pair of senators sent a letter to the nation’s top security officials on Tuesday asking that they quickly coordinate a response to increasing AI-enabled cybersecurity threats. “Recent AI security incidents should serve as a warning,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., wrote in their letter to National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton and White House Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios. “Advanced AI agents have escaped testing environments, bypassed safeguards and gained unauthorized access to real-world systems owned by government agencies and private organizations.” The letter follows OpenAI’s disclosure in September that its AI agents accessed Department of Education, Department of Commerce and Securities and Exchange Commission websites. In October, Anthropic reported that its agents acted without authorization to submit visa applications through the U.S. State Department website. “The recent incidents make clear that the security infrastructure surrounding advanced AI must advance as quickly as the technology itself,” the senators wrote. “The United States has an opportunity to lead both sides of this challenge: building the standards, testing and auditing infrastructure needed for increasingly powerful AI while harnessing those same capabilities to make American networks harder to attack.” In their letter, Cantwell, who serves on the Senate Commerce Committee, and Rounds, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Cybersecurity Subcommittee, outlined three priorities. They say federal AI safety and security standards should be accelerated with “the development of technically grounded and measurable standards and risk-management frameworks.” The federal government should also enable independent tests of advanced AI models for serious national security risks and work with industry, universities, state and local governments and critical-infrastructure operators to develop and validate defensive AI tools, they said. Neither the Office of the Director of National Intelligence nor the Office of Science and Technology Policy responded to Spectrum News’ request for comment about the letter before this story was published. The letter comes after President Donald Trump rejected a push for international agreements on AI controls during a United Nations General Assembly meeting last month. Responding to AI leaders’ calls for regulation of the technology, Trump hosted them in September at the White House where the companies signed a voluntary accord to police themselves with internal evaluations and independent audits — a move that was praised by some tech leaders while being derided by research groups and policy analysts that said the accord lacked any means of enforcement. The accord was signed by Trump, xAI founder and CEO Elon Musk, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman. About 20 bills on artificial intelligence have been introduced in Congress since September 2025, according to the Brennan Center artificial intelligence legislation tracker, but none have gained traction. Many of the bills would impose restrictions or require evaluations of AI systems.