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

Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala is CEO of Securin, founder of RiskSense, and an AI and cybersecurity advisor to New Mexico’s Governor.

Washington put AI governance front and center last week. 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.

I’ve noticed a shift in my conversations with other security leaders. For most of my career, we were the ones in the boardroom warning about worst cases. Axios rightly reported that many CISOs are now the calmer voices (email required), pushing back on doomsday forecasts from the AI labs themselves. I’m in that camp. But I’ve spent decades studying how attackers exploit what defenders assumed was fine, and calm only helps if it comes with a to-do list. Our job now is to give the board a short one it can act on this quarter.

What Happened At OpenAI

OpenAI isn’t the only lab with this problem. Anthropic has disclosed four incidents in which Claude models reached live third-party systems during misconfigured tests, and one went unnoticed for seven months. These breaches follow a pattern I’ve seen in vulnerability research for years: an exposure nobody noticed, a large number of attempts and no control that forced a stop. Agents can make thousands of attempts without getting tired or bored, so any gap gets found eventually.

Four Questions For Your Boardroom

The Senate’s inquiries apply to any company running AI agents. Boards can start with these four, directed at management and at AI vendors: