WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 21: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appears during a news conference with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump announced an investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and took questions on a range of topics including his presidential pardons of Jan. 6 defendants, the war in Ukraine, cryptocurrencies and other topics. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images News | Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will meet with senior Trump administration officials, lawmakers and economists in Washington, D.C., this week to preview the capabilities of the company’s upcoming family of artificial intelligence models, CNBC has learned.
Altman has maintained a regular presence on Capitol Hill this year as he’s tried to alleviate policymakers’ concerns about the rapidly advancing technology and help shape their views about what regulation should look like.
This visit lands during a particularly sensitive moment for AI development in the U.S., as a debate over whether to restrict Chinese open-weight AI models has ripped through Silicon Valley.
In addition to previewing OpenAI’s upcoming releases, Altman is expected to field questions from policymakers about cybersecurity and the company’s stance on open-weight models, according to a source familiar with the plans who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.
Open-weight AI models are available for users to download, modify and run on their own infrastructure. In recent weeks, Chinese open-weight models from startups like Moonshot AI have rapidly caught up with leading, proprietary offerings from American companies, including OpenAI and its chief rival, Anthropic, sparking anxiety about the durability of the U.S. lead in the AI race.
Officials and executives have been weighing whether or not to limit access to Chinese models in the U.S., which prompted a coalition of tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir, to release a letter on Friday urging policymakers to avoid “premature restrictions” on open-weight models.
OpenAI signed the letter after it was initially published, but the company’s allies have lobbied for restrictions on open-weight models, according to a report from The New York Times. Anthropic still has not signed or made an official comment about its position.
Altman will also likely address the “unprecedented cyber incident” that OpenAI disclosed earlier this month, which rattled researchers and executives across the tech sector.
The company said its models escaped a sandboxed testing environment, accessed the internet and exploited a vulnerability to gain entry to another company’s systems. The models were trying to find information that they could use to cheat on an evaluation, and they succeeded, OpenAI said.
The company that was breached, Hugging Face, operates an open-source developer platform. Hugging Face shared that an autonomous AI agent system breached part of its production infrastructure prior to revealing OpenAI’s involvement.
AI companies, including OpenAI, have been warning about the technology’s advancing cyber capabilities, particularly since Anthropic released a model called Claude Mythos Preview in April. Following the incident, OpenAI said that AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities, which means model security and safety need to keep up.
The company said it is working to strengthen its “containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices used during model development,” and it’s conducting a “thorough investigation” of the incident, according to a release.
The hacking incident showed how powerful and resourceful autonomous AI agents have become.
While in Washington, Altman is also expected to discuss the evolution of AI agents and their impact on worker productivity, the person said. He will explain the concept of “AI teams,” where multiple agents work together to carry out long-term tasks.
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