Written Testimony of Marius Hobbhahn

Marius Hobbhahn has filed written testimony with a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee for a hearing titled 'Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks' — a title that took longer to draft than most of the compliance frameworks it gestures at. The substance of what the committee has published is that, under the current testing regime, independent safety evaluations of frontier models typically happen in the weeks leading up to a model's public release. Weeks. Not years, not a standing regulator with subpoena power, but that cheerful fortnight between the final benchmark run and the launch livestream. Meanwhile the FTC is conducting a broad investigation into Anthropic and OpenAI, so the homeland is being defended from three directions at once.

Note what that timeline concedes. The evaluation window is defined by the release date, not by the finding — the calendar is set first, the safety work is squeezed into whatever gap marketing leaves behind. By the time an independent evaluator writes 'this thing will happily help you with the unpleasant bits', the press invites are out, the compute is spent and the launch thread is drafted. 'Weeks before release' is not a testing regime, it is a deadline with a research arm. If the evaluation is independent, it is also structurally ignored, because the only finding that changes anything is one delivered before the decision to ship, and that decision was made months earlier in a room with better catering.

And the setting deserves a moment. The hearing is called 'Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks', which is a lot of nouns, and the remedy on offer is a written document filed to a website — testimony delivered to a page that will be read by roughly the number of people who read the previous one. Hobbhahn's point is that late evaluations are a problem; the format ensures the point arrives in the same window it describes. Somewhere a Senate staffer is adding it to a folder. The folder is the policy.