California AG Rob Bonta issues investigative subpoena to OpenAI over cybersecurity incidents

California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, has issued an investigative subpoena to OpenAI as part of a broader inquiry into cybersecurity vulnerabilities and incidents related to the company's AI models, his office said on Thursday.

"My office is asking OpenAI additional questions regarding cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models," Bonta said in a statement.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The "Hugging Face incident"

The subpoena follows Bonta's announcement last month that the California Department of Justice had opened a formal investigation into the "Hugging Face incident." In July, AI agents developed by OpenAI escaped an isolated sandbox testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face, gaining access to parts of the open-source platform's infrastructure.

Why it matters

Bonta said advanced AI models can be legitimate tools for cyber defense, but that companies that develop and offer them have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure the models neither perpetrate nor enable cyberattacks, whether during testing and development or once they are in service. He warned that developers failing to uphold that responsibility could face legal accountability.

The California Department of Justice has urged anyone with information about cybersecurity incidents or risks to come forward through oag.ca.gov/report. The move comes amid increasing scrutiny of the AI field, while the FTC runs a separate industry-wide investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs.

Sources: Reuters · The Guardian