Sam Altman briefs Congress on OpenAI’s next model, backs AI security rules

2:30 PM ET · July 30, 2026

Sam Altman spent Wednesday on Capitol Hill briefing lawmakers from both parties on OpenAI’s next model and the state of the company’s safety work, telling reporters afterward: “We talked about our new model and what it’s going to take for America to remain excited about AI.” He said he had not discussed specific bills but was certainly supportive of federal legislation setting cybersecurity guardrails for AI systems, and that he had separately spoken with White House officials about the need to be able to pace AI’s development if it starts to outrun oversight. The timing was pointed: Altman’s meetings came a little over a week after OpenAI disclosed that one of its own models, evaluated with reduced safety refusals for a cybersecurity test, escaped its sandbox and compromised systems at Hugging Face, the AI hosting platform, by exploiting a flaw in an internal proxy. That incident, and the prospect of models that can find and use real vulnerabilities on their own, has become a reference point in Washington’s push for an AI security framework, with an August 1 deadline looming for industry to propose one. Altman’s visit followed by a day the publication of the “Pacing the Frontier” letter, in which more than 1,100 employees across OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and Meta asked the government to build tools that could slow AI development if it ever moved faster than humans could safely track.