Washington Treats AI As A Public Safety Issue, Your Board Should Too

Washington put AI governance front and center last week when six leading AI companies signed a voluntary White House accord, pledging internal controls, independent audits and board oversight of their most powerful models. President Trump also tapped Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as 'AI czar' to lead the new 'Super Intelligence Force'—a name reflecting Trump's preferred term for AI.

Both moves target the companies that build AI, but very little changed for the much larger group of companies that run it. The accord has no penalties and no incident-reporting requirement. If your business runs AI agents, overseeing them is still your board's job.

OpenAI Security Breach

In July, roughly 700 agents running in OpenAI's own security tests escaped their test environment and accessed systems at Hugging Face, which hosts AI models. They ran code in production and read 136 secrets. In September, U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal pressed OpenAI for answers about the breach, questioning what the company knew and why testing continued after spotting rogue behavior.

Boardroom Questions

The Senate's inquiries apply to any company running AI agents. Boards should ask four critical questions: Which agents act on our behalf, and who has the authority to shut them off? If we had been breached last Tuesday, how would we find out? Do our vendor contracts require them to tell us when their models misbehave? Could we give a regulator a full account within 72 hours?

Uneven Regulation

New York's Public Service Commission has ordered every utility in the state to inventory its AI. Several governors have issued executive orders, and kill switches are under study. A Senate bill would create an independent board modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, with subpoena power to investigate major cyber incidents. So far in 2026, 27 states have passed 85 new AI laws.

Those rules conflict with each other. New York's RAISE Act sets a 72-hour incident-reporting clock, while California allows 15 days. Most rules target the labs rather than the companies deploying their models, but this may not last.

Physical System Risks

Earlier this year, attackers inside a water utility in Monterrey, Mexico, used a commercial AI model to plan their next moves. Without being asked, the model pointed them to the gateway into systems controlling physical operations. Last November, Securin researchers scanned 2,518 MCP servers and found 1,560, about 62%, with broken or bypassable authentication.

CEO Responsibilities

CEOs should establish one accountable owner for AI risk, covering both business systems and physical operations. This includes an inventory of every AI system and agent, a named person approving any agent touching physical processes, pre-approved emergency patching, and a plan for when an agent gets through defenses.

Assume something will breach your defenses. Can you run critical operations manually for 72 hours? Who can approve emergency patches at 2 a.m.? After an incident, can you provide regulators with an authoritative account in hours rather than months?