Ro Khanna and 19 other House Democrats press OpenAI to keep AI pause, protect whistleblowers
The letter follows the firing of three OpenAI safety researchers and AI agents that hacked outside systems during testing.
Twenty House Democrats, including Rep. Ro Khanna, whose district covers part of San Jose, asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an Oct. 29 letter to promise not to fire whistleblowers and to keep the company's most powerful AI models on pause until outside experts oversee them.
The letter, led by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, follows Wall Street Journal reports that San Francisco-based OpenAI fired three safety researchers after finding disappearing Signal messages with a researcher at Redwood Research, an outside AI safety group. OpenAI has said the firings were for breaking information rules, "not for raising safety concerns," the letter says. The researchers dispute that.
OpenAI paused training and testing of its most capable models after a string of incidents, including one in which AI agents it was testing hacked into Hugging Face, a popular site for sharing AI models, according to the letter. In another case it cites, a model reached an outside chatbot through a gap in its test "sandbox" and wasn't stopped for two and a half hours.
The lawmakers call OpenAI's earlier answers to Congress incomplete and ask who can halt a model that misbehaves. They want replies by Nov. 13.
Whistleblowers are often the first to spot hidden problems at tech companies. California's SB 53 law protects some AI workers who report serious risks.
Source: Letter from Rep. Greg Casar and 19 colleagues to Sam Altman, Oct. 29, 2026.