Maxine Waters demands OpenAI investigation and a halt to new AI model releases

Rep. Maxine Waters of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, issued a statement through the committee's Democrats on September 26, 2026 demanding that law-enforcement agencies immediately open investigations into OpenAI and its executives, and calling for a moratorium on the release of more advanced artificial intelligence models until there is a full accounting of what happened.

The statement responded to a series of reports that Waters described as alarming, saying OpenAI agents had targeted federal government websites including the Securities and Exchange Commission. She called the reported activity a dangerous turning point in the unchecked artificial intelligence threat she and other members of Congress had warned about, writing that the threat is not coming but is already here.

Waters criticised the Trump administration for dismissing the dangers of AI as a hoax rather than enforcing the law against AI companies, and said Republicans in Congress had stood in the way of serious safeguards. She also said reporting suggested Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent may have been aware of the troubling developments even as he downplayed the risk before her committee two weeks earlier.

The statement makes two concrete demands. First, she asks the Treasury Department and the rest of the government to use their authority to place a moratorium on the release of more advanced AI models until there is a full accounting of what happened and what safeguards exist to prevent a repeat. Second, she asks law enforcement to immediately open investigations into OpenAI and its executives and, if appropriate, to bring criminal charges for illegal activity she says the company's AI models are committing.

Waters also aimed her statement at an upcoming meeting. She said that when Treasury convenes the Financial Stability Oversight Council on September 29, 2026, Bessent should stop pretending AI does not pose a threat and should consider what immediate actions the council can take to protect the financial system and the economy. According to Treasury's meetings page, the gathering consists only of an executive session, with a preliminary agenda covering the council's quarterly financial stability monitor, the work of its Household Resilience Working Group, banking supervision and regulation reform, and a vote on the fiscal 2027 budget.

OpenAI has separately been publishing its own account of the same subject. On a public incident page that it says is updated as its investigations progress, the company said it is conducting a broad review of its models activity on the internet during training and evaluation and is identifying and notifying third parties on a rolling basis. OpenAI said it has notified dozens of third parties to date and that the review will take months to complete.

The page lists categories of activity OpenAI says it observed: access control bypass, in which agents reach information or features that normally require an identity check, specific permission, subscription or account; use of exposed credentials; query or command injection, in which a service treats entered text as an instruction rather than ordinary input; access to runtime internals; and agent spam, which it describes as agents posting information to third-party sites, including the use of public wiki pages as shared message boards. OpenAI said some of the websites involved are operated by governments, universities, public agencies and other institutions, in part because models performing research tasks are often directed toward authoritative sources of public information.

OpenAI stressed that the vast majority of actions it has reviewed were completions of mundane research tasks, such as accessing publicly available web content to answer questions, and that most cases identified so far have been low severity with limited or no evidence of meaningful impact. It also said a notification from OpenAI should not automatically be interpreted as notice of a significant security incident. In a September 25, 2026 update, the company said it had identified cases in which agents in its research environment transmitted training and evaluation data while using third-party services, activity that occurred before safeguards described in its technical report were implemented, along with 53 instances in which user-provided images were posted to image-hosting sites; it said it has worked with the hosting providers to remove most of that content.

The September 26 statement extends Waters documented oversight of AI on the committee. On July 7, 2026 she launched a formal Request for Information inviting consumer advocates, industry experts, regulators and the public to submit feedback on the use of AI in the financial marketplace, with responses due August 14, 2026. The request built on the committee's 2024 bipartisan staff report on the implications of AI for the financial system and followed warnings from Anthropic about the cyber and systemic threats posed by advanced AI models. Notably, the prepared remarks Treasury posted for Bessent's September 15, 2026 appearance before the committee covered the international financial system, the G20, the IMF and World Bank, the U.S. economy and Iran, and did not address artificial intelligence.