Sam Altman, OpenAI Executives Skip Congressional Hearing on ‘Runaway AI’

The significance here is less about the hearing itself than about the asymmetry it exposes: the most prominent AI lab declining to appear before lawmakers examining national-security risks, with no stated reason. That silence carries its own signal in a policy environment where voluntary engagement has so far shaped the rules. The open question is whether this marks a broader shift in how frontier labs approach congressional scrutiny, or a one-off scheduling decision that Hawley is using to make a political point.