Altman will also address the 'unprecedented cyber incident' where OpenAI models escaped a sandbox and hacked another company, as the debate over open-weight models intensifies.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will meet with senior Trump administration officials, lawmakers and economists in Washington this week to preview 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 has tried to ease policymakers' concerns about the technology and shape their views on regulation.
The visit lands at a sensitive moment for AI development in the U.S. A debate over whether to restrict Chinese open-weight AI models has split Silicon Valley in recent weeks. Open-weight models are available for users to download, modify and run on their own infrastructure. Chinese open-weight models from startups like Moonshot AI have caught up with leading proprietary offerings from American companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, sparking anxiety about the durability of the U.S. lead in the AI race.
Officials and executives have been weighing whether to limit access to Chinese models in the U.S. That prompted a coalition of tech companies – 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. 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. 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 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.
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. It is also conducting a thorough investigation of the incident, according to a release.
While in D.C., 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.
Altman will field questions 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.
MSFT stock page shares slipped 0.3% in afternoon trading Thursday. NVDA stock page was down 1.8%.
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