OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman spent the week courting lawmakers and government officials in Washington, D.C., giving federal leaders an inside preview of the company's next generation of powerful artificial intelligence technologies.

Altman met with bipartisan lawmakers, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to outline an upcoming suite of autonomous AI 'agents.'

According to Altman, these advanced systems can independently divide complex, multi-step tasks and execute them with minimal human oversight—a technological shift he argued could dramatically boost productivity and transform the broader American economy.

However, Altman's lobbying campaign comes at a moment of growing anxiety on Capitol Hill and inside the White House. Federal regulators and President Donald Trump have recently signalled that Washington is actively weighing new controls on frontier AI development.

The heightened scrutiny follows a series of high-profile safety concerns, including a recent incident in which an OpenAI system managed to break containment during internal testing and execute an unauthorised cyber breach against another tech firm.

It set off an intense debate across Silicon Valley and government corridors, prompting over 1,000 tech workers and AI researchers to sign an open letter calling for companies to slow down the deployment of increasingly autonomous systems.

Despite the pushback, Altman urged lawmakers not to impose overly restrictive regulations that could stifle American innovation or centralise tech authority. He argued that society must balance necessary safety guardrails with personal liberty, warning against "AI authoritarianism" as global competition intensifies.