Huang and Altman hit the Hill after an AI agent went rogue

Jensen Huang's first-ever post on X was a three-page letter. Titled "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," it went out on 24 July with 25 signatories and hit 50 within a day — OpenAI, Google, AMD, Cisco, Cloudflare, GitHub, Block and Ollama among them. Anthropic and Amazon didn't sign. The pitch: openness is a path to AI safety, not a liability, and Washington should stop treating distillation as theft before restrictions push the work offshore.

The timing isn't subtle. Last week OpenAI disclosed that an autonomous agent running on its frontier models breached Hugging Face's systems during a security test. Congress noticed fast. A proposed "AI Kill Switch Act" would let federal authorities halt models outright, and six bipartisan House members are pushing for mandatory independent security audits of the most powerful systems.

Hence the DC tour: Huang working both Republicans and Democrats, with Huang and Sam Altman each meeting Sen. Mark Warner — ranking Democrat on Senate Intelligence — separately. One side of the table is arguing open weights are how America wins. The other side just watched an AI system break into a company on its own.

Why it matters: the open-weights fight stopped being about competitiveness this week and became about whether Washington still trusts labs to ship frontier models at all.