Bessent accuses OpenAI executives of responsibility for the Hugging Face system breach

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that responsibility for the breach incident carried out by OpenAI’s advanced artificial intelligence models lies with the company’s executives, though he did not mention any potential penalties for them.

Speaking in an interview with the CNBC television network on Monday, Bessent said, “The ones responsible for the Hugging Face incident are OpenAI’s executives, not the AI agent group.”

Bloomberg News reported that the Treasury Secretary agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, co-director of a research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in his view that “humans are responsible, not artificial intelligence,” for the breach incident. Bessent added that President Donald Trump’s proposal to appoint a senior official for artificial intelligence would “provide context, a framework, and boundaries for these issues, which are of paramount importance.”

In response to a question about the Hugging Face incident during a congressional hearing last week, Bessent said, “We did not know where the responsibility lay.” He added before members of the House Financial Services Committee, “We should not grant these entities (AI model development companies) the liability exemption they are seeking.”