Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Sunday that the federal government does not need to pass new artificial intelligence laws after reports that rogue AI programs targeted government websites.

He made the comments after OpenAI’s AI agents probed and accessed sites at the Education Department, the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

During an appearance on Fox & Friends Weekend, Blanche said, “Everybody’s saying more laws, more laws, more regulation, but we don’t need it. We don’t need it right now.”

He added, “If you're a bad actor in the AI space, it's not as if there's no laws that are on the books.”

Earlier this month, the attorney general said he would not use the DOJ to impose more restrictions on artificial intelligence. 

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US Attorney General Todd Blanche says he prefers a restrained approach to taking enforcement action against artificial intelligence companies and executives amid a rising debate over the risks of the cutting-edge technology.

Blanche criticized his predecessors in the Biden administration for taking a heavy-handed approach against companies in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg News. He said the Justice Department under his leadership, will take action only in cases of clear violations of the law.

“I’m not going to do regulation by prosecution and investigate or prosecute AI companies when there’s not a statute that they’re violating,” Blanche said. “If we’re going to charge somebody with violating the laws and take away their liberty and put them in prison, it should be because they violated the law.”

The New York Times, along with other media outlets, reported on the OpenAI incident, which was the latest in a series of instances in which agentic AI programs went rogue.

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue and meddled with the websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge, according to security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes.

The incidents involving the Commerce Department and the S.E.C. were confirmed by OpenAI, which said it was continuing to investigate the situation with the Department of Education. The San Francisco company said it had notified the government agencies in recent weeks that its A.I. agents — which are bots that can act autonomously — interacted with their sites in unusual ways.

With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said. The A.I. also pulled data from the Census Bureau website, which is housed at the Commerce Department, using login credentials it found online. Separately, OpenAI’s agents shared public data from the S.E.C. website on an online forum.

None of the incidents were breaches, OpenAI said, but were examples of its technology’s behaving in unexpected and concerning ways. The company recently discovered the occurrences while conducting a review of hacks carried out by its technology, including an attack on an Australian government website in June and on the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July.

These reports have prompted many to call for more federal regulation on artificial intelligence development. But the Trump administration has resisted these calls, arguing that too many onerous regulations will only slow the industry down and make America less competitive with other countries that are embracing the technology.