Other lawmakers, meanwhile, focused on Greenberg’s virtual appearance and an impression in the room that he was reading his answers from his screen.

“Are you answering our questions, or are you just following what your AI model is telling you to say?” asked Spanish conservative lawmaker Pablo Arias Echeverría.

Greenberg fired back: “I should take that as a compliment since we’re very proud of Claude.”

In his answers, Greenberg said the rise of cyber-capable models shows AI is a dual-use tool, and that now is the time for companies to boost their cyber resilience. He also said that Anthropic is working with the Commission’s AI Office and the EU’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, to enable that.

The hearing ended as awkwardly as it had kicked off, with Greenberg no longer visible on screen when chair Cavazzini thanked him for his appearance.

The question of if, how and by whom new advanced artificial intelligence models are tested has become a delicate geopolitical and business question as the AI race heats up.

At another meeting earlier in the day, a representative of Open AI, one of Anthropic’s chief rivals, told lawmakers it was working to avoid staged rollouts of its new models. Meanwhile on Tuesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis called for the U.S. to create an industry-funded standards body to test frontier AI models and set standards.