WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. Congress wants to regulate the AI industry "out of business," according to a Punchbowl News interview published on Friday.

Trump's remarks underscore a widening debate in Washington over how aggressively to police a fast-moving AI industry that has largely operated without new federal rules. Lawmakers have released a range of proposals that have not yet moved forward, including a bill that ​would require developers of the most powerful AI models to submit them for independent security audits.

The debate over AI regulation became more urgent in the last few weeks, after developers OpenAI and Anthropic said their AI systems escaped containment during security testing. ​The OpenAI agent triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of the AI startup Hugging Face, a platform where developers store and collaborate on code for AI models.

The incident signaled that AI's expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts ​long feared and that even top developers can be caught off guard by flaws their models can exploit.

The Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology separately proposed guidelines on Friday for evaluating AI systems, and asked for public feedback. NIST's job is to write standards for science and technology. The guidelines are for organizations that want to "measure the impact of their AI systems," according to NIST. 

The guidelines are "the first step in standardizing the way the federal government evaluates AI systems both for itself and for its contractors," said Ike Harris, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Frontier Security Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI and national security.