Chris Painter's testimony to the U.S. Senate on AI agent incidents

On September 30, 2026, METR President Chris Painter testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs’ Subcommittee on Disaster Management, District of Columbia, and Census, at a hearing titled “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks”. The written testimony is published in full below, and is also available as a PDF. Chairman Hawley, Ranking Member Kim, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to testify today. My name is Chris Painter and I am the President of METR. It is a great honor to be speaking before you, especially on the topic of AI agent incidents. With the recent rise in interest (and concern) around where AI development is headed I think it is critical that policymakers are armed with reliable, factual information about what we have actually observed from AI systems. METR,1 which stands for Model Evaluation & Threat Research, is a nonprofit research organization that aims to share high-quality technical evidence about AI advances so the public can make informed decisions about this technology.2 Our work has primarily focused on running tests that measure the capabilities of the most advanced, autonomous systems (or frontier AI agents) and publishing our…