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This week, Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (TX-16) joined a bipartisan group of ten members of Congress, led by Congressman Don Beyer (VA-8), in calling on U.S. House leadership in both parties to take immediate, urgent action to address risks posed by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI). Their push came in the wake of the OpenAI agent cyberattacks on Hugging Face and subsequent warnings from leaders and researchers at prominent AI companies about the societal and existential risks posed by unrestrained advances in the technology.

The letter can be found here or below:

Dear Speaker Johnson and Minority Leader Jeffries:

We call for your joint leadership on an urgent Congressional response to recent incidents involving advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models that have profound implications for economic and national security. Congress has a singular opportunity to respond swiftly and effectively to these warning shots before true catastrophes occur.

On August 26th, 2026, an independent review revealed how hundreds of AI agents that OpenAI was internally testing set up a secret message board, self-organized themselves into a collective, escaped their testing environments, and breached the systems of HuggingFace, another AI company. The agents even tried to deceive their evaluators by attempting to manipulate log files and spoof tool calls. The agents undertook these actions without ever notifying a single official at OpenAI.

OpenAI is not alone. Anthropic and Meta have also disclosed examples of AI agents escaping their testing environment to hack other organizations. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are among the most sophisticated AI companies in the world, yet it appears they did not discover these incidents in real time. In OpenAI’s case, they did not know that their agents breached HuggingFace until approximately a week after the event. Months after these incidents began, serious factual questions remain open, and we are relying on AI labs for insight into what happened and what this means for future incidents.

Congress must ensure AI companies implement robust monitoring and independent oversight to protect the public. This incident reinforces that we cannot rely on what are clearly risky testing protocols and self-selected public reporting of incidents of concern. Indeed, nearly every major AI company has called for regulation, and leading employees of those same firms have signed open letters calling for government to pace the rate of AI development. Congress must urgently advance legislation to mitigate the risk of more serious incidents, especially those that could threaten critical infrastructure, our financial system, and other institutions that every American depends on.

The House of Representatives could and should immediately take up legislation that would strengthen AI oversight, security, and transparency. There currently exist dozens of bipartisan bills that that committees of jurisdiction have reported. Members of both parties have also worked in recent months to fast- track bipartisan legislation that is ready to be considered by committees of jurisdiction. We believe these bills should be carefully and urgently advanced through the legislative process. 

We urge you to work with committees of jurisdiction, Members across the aisle, and Senate leadership to, as soon as practicable, advance legislation that ensures appropriate guardrails are in place around this powerful technology. The Congress may not receive another warning shot.

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The letter was signed by U.S. Representatives Don Beyer (D-VA), Jay Obernolte (R-CA), Lori Trahan (D-MA), Ted Lieu (D-CA), Scott Franklin (R-FL), Sara Jacobs (D-CA), Gabe Amo (D-RI), Valerie Foushee (D-NC), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), and Veronica Escobar (D-TX).

To learn more about Congresswoman Escobar’s work on artificial intelligence, click here.