Is a new regulatory empire really necessary for artificial intelligence?
Clément Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, has an unusually credible answer. His company runs one of the world’s leading open-source platforms for developers to build, share, and test machine-learning and AI models, and it was the target of a high-profile cyberattack involving OpenAI models earlier this year.
Yet in an interview with POLITICO at its Decoding Summit, Delangue argued that Washington may not need to reinvent the wheel. Rather than constructing an expansive new AI bureaucracy, he suggested policymakers should adapt and enforce existing cyber laws against AI-enabled wrongdoing. That view carries particular weight coming from the victim of what has been described as the first major, fully autonomous, multi-step AI cyberattack.
Hugging Face CEO @ClementDelangue, whose company was the victim of an AI-led cyberattack, said existing cyber laws are likely sufficient to govern advanced AI.
— POLITICO (@politico) September 16, 2026
“I’m not even sure that we need to reinvent the wheel,” he told @alexanderburns at @POLITICOLive’s Decoded Summit.👇 pic.twitter.com/Sl9iF1vSUs
"You've called specifically for, and the quote is, meaningful penalties for AI cyber attacks," POLITICO's Alexander Burns said. "What qualifies as a meaningful penalty in this world?"
"I'm not a judge, I'm not a policymaker—" Delangue said.
"But you understand the technology better than most judges, I would reckon," Burns said.
"Yeah, I mean, of course, the goal is for these penalties to be fair with the damages that these cyber attacks are causing, and the risk that they pose for society, for companies. I actually think that a lot of the legal frameworks are already here," Delangue said. "I'm not even sure that we need to reinvent the wheel and create new regulation, because the legal system for cyber attacks, you know, is already working well today. So I suspect it's more kind of like making sure that this is enforced, that it still works adapting it for this new world of AI."
Despite more measured voices in the industry, several of AI’s biggest names, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and xAI founder Elon Musk, are calling for a new federal framework to slow development of the most advanced models. Their message has found a receptive public: more than half of Americans favor a pause, and some polling has put support for stronger AI safeguards at more than 80 percent.
Congress is listening. Lawmakers on both the Left and right have shown growing interest in new rules, including mandatory safety evaluations, incident reporting, and even “kill-switch” requirements.
But this push could do less to protect America from AI than to construct an oligopoly for the dominant companies already developing it, while crushing open-source models, their most promising competitors. There are no guarantees about what AI will bring. Still, as with every major technology, it is reasonable to expect artificial intelligence to deliver enormous benefits long before it realizes Silicon Valley’s darkest sci-fi fantasies.
The better path is to harness the technology, encourage competition, and punish actual harms under existing law, not build policy around fear, speculative catastrophe, and a dark fantasy that has captivated Silicon Valley tech bros for nearly three decades.
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