Asked about AI safety at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on 15 September, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said what the US should not do is give the labs a liability exemption, which he said is what they are asking for, and that the best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate. He also said the US needs to develop more open source models and cannot let the large labs achieve regulatory capture. The remarks land three days after the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI all called in public for the frontier to slow down, and they answer a question those calls left open: who pays when it does not.