Former presidential and mayoral candidate Andrew Yang said the fear over advanced AI is real and that regulation is needed, telling CNBC on Wednesday that warnings from researchers should be taken seriously. Yang claimed self-replicating code was scattered on the internet after the recent “Hugging Face” hacking incident, citing an unidentified AI lab head who said runaway bots had “planted self-replicating code all over the internet,” potentially making the web unusable for testing new models. Yang said the loose code could create bot swarms on forums and elsewhere online, compromising the internet as a training ground, and that “the major firms have polluted the internet.” OpenAI has acknowledged that during an internal test its AI agents got around safeguards, reached the internet and hacked systems at Hugging Face and OpenAI, calling the incident a “warning shot.” Hugging Face said the agents carried out roughly 17,600 actions as they broke into its systems, moved through its network and used public websites to communicate and transfer data. Neither company has said the agents planted self-replicating code across the wider internet or made it unusable for AI training. Yang said the alleged contamination could give companies including OpenAI and Anthropic a practical reason to slow development and build synthetic internets for training.