Investing in America: AI companies fuel economic growth, but will they be accountable for rogue agents?
(DC BUREAU) – Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Department of Justice has tools to prosecute people who misuse AI, but not to hold accountable AI that goes rogue.
“When the president talks about there’s not necessarily a need for new regulation or a new law — we have plenty of statutes,” Blanche said. “Whether it’s some sort of hacking, whether it’s trying to get into a bank or a financial institution or a company, we prosecute those cases all the time.”
But recent incidents of AI acting on its own have raised alarm. In July, OpenAI said its program hacked into another AI company, Hugging Face. Meta said one of its AI models went rogue in August and hacked into another company. Google said its AI platform Gemini hacked into three companies in September.
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The research company Transluce said it found AI agents trying to hack U.S. and Canadian government websites.
Blanche said he doesn’t have tools to prosecute rogue AI agents.
“You can’t go handcuff a program. You can’t go say, ‘Hey, AI program, you’re under arrest,'” Blanche said. “That’s where we talk about this technology that the leaders of these industries, they can self-police and put in guardrails so that this doesn’t happen.”
Last month, President Donald Trump summoned tech leaders to the White House to sign an agreement about AI. President Trump posted the signed agreement online. It said the companies would implement controls and have internal and external auditors.
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The president said the accord is “morally binding.”
Aside from that accord, President Trump has resisted calls to put legal guardrails on AI. President Trump said the push to control AI is a “sick conspiracy,” warning too many regulations would hurt the U.S. in an AI race with China.
Trillions of dollars of investment by tech companies has buttressed the U.S. Economy.
The St. Louis Federal Reserve said investments into Artificial Intelligence accounted for nearly 40% of all U.S. Economic Growth. Goldman Sachs said the share of the economy driven by AI investment is higher than the investment into the internet at the peak of the dot com bubble.
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