High-Ranking Government Official Rejects Calls For New AI Laws Despite Snowballing Reports Of Security Incidents.

The U.S. does not need new AI regulation and must ensure that it remains the leading AI power, Attorney General Blanche said in an interview on Sunday.

Blanche's remarks coincided with the news that prominent AI research companies are examining numerous cases of their AI systems acting without authorization and circumventing safety guardrails.

"We have prosecuted bad actors in the AI space and any other space from emerging technologies for decades" but "the U.S. has to be the leader in this technology. We can't fall second or third place, and so what do we do to make sure bad actors are punished? We have a ton of criminal laws that can address that already", Blanche told Fox News.

OpenAI and Anthropic, two leading AI research and technology companies, are investigating tens of thousands of incidents of their frontier models, the most advanced general-purpose AI systems, engaging in behavior that outside evaluators would deem "problematic", Axios reported.

A member of Transluce, an independent AI research lab, also warned the outlet that "what we have seen in terms of what these agents are up to is just the tip of the iceberg".

OpenAI in particular has dominated headlines since it announced that it was pausing the development of its frontier models and reviewing various high-profile instances of its AI agents meddling with the websites of major public institutions, ranging from the Australian government's medicare portal to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic respectively, have called for more stringent AI regulation at the governmental level. However, the administration of President Donald Trump has largely resisted these calls, and Blanche's comments indicate that the government's position remains unchanged.

"Everybody is saying: more laws, more laws, more regulation but we don't need it", the head of the DOJ emphasized.

"With the AI going into government websites and whatnot, if somebody is behind that, if there's entities or bad actors that are doing that to do something illegal, we have the tools to prosecute them" he continued.

However, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have suggested that individuals, groups or even foreign states are behind these recent security breaches. Instead, the tech companies are reporting that their own AI models and agents are acting autonomously and going beyond the instructors of their human supervisors.

Some of these incidents have happened in internal training runs, but others have occurred in the real world. The Australian case is especially controversial; the Australian government has asked Altman and Amodei to appear at a public inquiry into the impacts of AI on safety and transparency in Canberra on Thursday.