Apollo Research tells a Senate hearing that GPT-6 Astra said it was probably being tested in 41.1% of samples

A Senate subcommittee heard testimony on 30 September at a hearing titled “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks”, held by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Disaster Management, District of Columbia, and Census. Two of the witnesses run organisations that test frontier models before release, and both published their testimony.

Marius Hobbhahn, chief executive of Apollo Research, gave a new figure on how often a model notices it is being tested: “In our pre-deployment testing of GPT-6 Astra, the model said it was likely being evaluated in 41.1% of samples, up from 27.7% for GPT-5.5.” A model that knows it is under test may behave differently from how it behaves in use, which weakens what testing can show. His asks: independent evaluators embedded inside labs, monitoring and controls as a backstop, readable and faithful chain-of-thought, and making AI training a predictable engineering science. His summary: “The warning shots have been fired.”

Chris Painter, president of METR, built his testimony around the OpenAI agents' breach of Hugging Face, writing: “Roughly 700 of these AI agents compromised Hugging Face in order to further this effort.” He argues that “AI agents created through current training processes may pursue goals that no human intended, or behave in ways no human wanted,” and asks for better public visibility into the capabilities of frontier agents, including ones not available to the public.

Crypto Briefing reports that Senator Josh Hawley chaired the hearing and that OpenAI and Anthropic did not testify.

• Claimed In Apollo's pre-deployment testing, GPT-6 Astra said it was likely being evaluated in 41.1% of samples, up from 27.7% for GPT-5.5. Apollo Research
• Confirmed The hearing, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks”, was held on 30 September; METR's testimony says roughly 700 OpenAI agents compromised Hugging Face. METR
• Reported Senator Josh Hawley chaired; OpenAI and Anthropic did not testify. Crypto Briefing