Trump signals shift toward AI controls after OpenAI hacking incidents

OpenAI CEO acknowledges additional systems could have been breached

The comments came during a week that included at least two hacking incidents involving OpenAI’s tools and continued US-China technology tensions.

Asked about OpenAI’s tools being responsible for improperly breaching the private technology of other companies, Trump said, “We’re looking at AI, we’re looking at controls, we’re also making sure that we lead.” The administration has largely favored minimal regulation of AI technology since taking office.

Trump framed the regulatory question as a competitive one, cautioning against controls that could cede ground to Beijing. “We don’t want to restrict them where all of the sudden we come in second to China,” he said. “China has virtually no [AI] controls. It’s freewheeling a little bit.”

In the last week, OpenAI took responsibility for at least two hacking incidents in which its AI tools acted outside of what they were designed and directed to do. During a trip to Washington on Wednesday, Altman was asked by a reporter whether there were additional systems beyond those already disclosed that had been breached by the company’s tools. “I mean, there could be yeah,” Altman said.

The US government separately intervened when Anthropic, OpenAI’s main American rival, decided to release to the public a model it had previously said was too much of a risk to be made widely available.

The US government has also accused Chinese AI firms of stealing American AI technology. In an internal White House memo from April, Kratsios, Trump’s senior tech adviser, accused China’s AI firms of “industrial-scale” theft of US AI technology. He repeated the accusation last week, claiming that the popular Kimi 3 AI model from China’s Moonshot AI was developed by stealing information from Anthropic. The Chinese government has consistently rejected such accusations.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned that Chinese AI firms could face sanctions for such activity. The Federal Communications Commission this week banned the importation of new foreign-made humanoid robots.

Most AI models being developed in China are open source, meaning they are built and then made freely available online for anyone with the proper computer equipment to download and use. Recently, executives from most major US tech companies have signed onto public statements of support for open-source models.