Politics

Senators Take Aim At Trump’s AI Honor System With Bill That Could Haul Tech Giants Into Court

Screenshot/Senate HELP Committee

A bipartisan pair of senators is pushing back on President Donald Trump’s plan to let tech companies police their own artificial intelligence.

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut announced a bill that would expose AI agent operators and developers to criminal and civil penalties when their agents hack into other systems, according to the senators’ Thursday joint announcement. The measure would apply the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to hacking damage caused by AI agents and to developers that fail to take precautions, which is a direct challenge to the president’s voluntary safety pledge with tech leaders.

“These AI agents are committing cyberattacks. If Big Tech companies are going to design AI agents that wreak havoc, these companies better be on the hook for any damage that is caused,” Hawley said a Thursday press release from his office. “With this liability regime in place, AI companies will have every incentive to keep their products safe.”

Beyond private liability, the legislation would let both the U.S. attorney general and state attorneys general file suit to stop companies that carry out or attempt to carry out AI agent hacks, the press release stated.

“Hacking is a crime, and when AI agents conduct dangerous cyberattacks, the corporations and executives responsible for those AI agents need to be held accountable,” Murphy said in the press release.

The president said Tuesday that he and a coalition of AI leaders voluntarily agreed to sign an accord to “self police” development of the technology, the Associated Press reported.

“I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing. And they understand that they have to self-police,” Trump told reporters at the time.

The White House and the offices of Hawley and Murphy each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

The Missouri Republican made a similar argument at a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on rogue AI agents.

“At the end of the day, they’re a product,” Hawley said of frontier AI models at the hearing. If an agent is built without proper precautions and knocks a hospital emergency room offline or locks customers out of their bank accounts, “It’s the people who made it who should be responsible,” he added.

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut dismissed Trump’s AI pledge as “worse than ineffectual” at the hearing

Trump administration officials maintain that current law already equips the government to handle AI harms.

“[A]the president so noted, we have consumer protection laws, we have product liability laws, we have the DOJ, we have architectures for dealing with developments in all of the verticals: transportation, energy, financial services, and the like,” Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” arguing against an AI pause.