OpenAI CEO Sam Altman refused to attend hearing on risks of ‘rogue AI’: Senator

US Senator Josh Hawley said Wednesday that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman refused to attend a subcommittee's hearing on the risks of "rogue AI."

"For the record, there is one witness whom we invited who you won't be hearing from today, and that's Sam Altman of OpenAI. We extended an invitation to him to be here to do his own panel if he wanted, and he turned us down," Hawley said at the hearing.

Calling Altman's decision to not appear before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Disaster Management Subcommittee as "unfortunate," he said "I think the American people deserve to know exactly what's going on at all of these companies, and to give us the sort of transparency that I think is needed for not just comfort, but to have an understanding of what these companies -- that are the most powerful companies in the world -- are doing right now with the most powerful technology ever known to man."

"I hope that he'll be willing to come and talk with us in the future," he added.

Earlier this week, US Reps. Josh Gottheimer, Ted Lieu and Valerie Foushee demanded that the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceXAI, Google and Meta provide a full accounting of unauthorized system intrusions carried out by their AI models by Oct. 2, citing incidents involving an OpenAI agent's access to non-public data on an Australian government health portal and delayed disclosures of such breaches.