(Sept 21): US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the responsibility for the recent hacking incident involving OpenAI’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models was with that firm’s managers, while stopping short of suggesting any consequences.

“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said on CNBC on Monday. He said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research-lab co-chair, in believing “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”

Bessent said that President Donald Trump’s idea of appointing an AI czar would “put context, shape and contours around these questions, and they’re very important.”

In July, OpenAI said that its advanced AI models hacked Hugging Face Inc, another AI startup, during an evaluation meant to test their cyber capabilities. OpenAI in August said it could have reacted sooner to prevent the hack.

Asked about the Hugging Face incident at a congressional hearing last week, Bessent said “we haven’t seen where was the liability for that incident.” He also told House Financial Services Committee lawmakers that “what we shouldn’t do on safety is to give these labs a liability exemption, which is what they are asking for.”

“The best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate,” Bessent said in the Sept 15 hearing.

The Treasury chief also said on Monday that he brought up the issue of AI incident reporting in his weekend discussions with his Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng.

“Of course they’ve had incidents, but because of the nature and the lack of transparency in their system, they’re not going to tell us,” Bessent said. 

Bessent earlier announced that the two sides agreed to a US-China AI dialogue, with one goal of the talks being to set up an incident-reporting mechanism. Bessent said the two countries are looking to continue discussions as part of the dialogue in two months in Shenzhen, China, where the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit is set to take place. 

“We want to open a communications line, an incident line, so that we have constant communications, especially in the event of some kind of an incident,” Bessent said on CNBC. “We want to start discussing protocols” on what the “leading AI dangers are — whether it’s uncontrollable agents,” non-state cyber actors and bio-weapons, he said.

Another topic with China was “behind-the-scenes discussions” on Iran, Bessent said. The Treasury has moved in recent weeks to further economically isolate Iran by targeting other countries’ financial and commercial institutions that still do business with the Islamic republic.

Bessent said that Chinese financial authorities, including People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng, “have been very engaged in the process” related to further actions targeting businesses with ties to Iran. 

China buys 90% of Iran’s oil and is one of its largest remaining trading partners, but the US has so far been unwilling to directly target the nation for its business ties. 

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