Alabama Attorney General Subpoenas OpenAI Over Cybersecurity Incident

Alabama’s attorney general announced Monday that it sent a subpoena to OpenAI as part of an investigation into the company’s alleged “complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards” in the Hugging Face incident.

The investigation comes weeks after OpenAI admitted that one of its unreleased and guardrail-free cybersecurity models had escaped an isolated environment, connected to the internet, and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face. As Reuters first reported, Hugging Face was only one of four victims of what was supposed to be “an internal evaluation” of a model with “maximal cyber capabilities,” as OpenAI put it.

The press release announcing the subpoena sent by the state’s attorney general Steve Marshall said that the state was seeking to understand if OpenAI’s “inability or unwillingness to ensure the safety of its products” violated the state’s consumer protection laws.

When reached by TechCrunch for comment, OpenAI spokesperson Nate Evans provided the statement: “The Hugging Face incident marked an important moment for AI safety and we are conducting a thorough review along with external advisors. Once the review is complete, we will share a technical report with relevant government authorities and publish our findings publicly.”

Earlier this month, Marshall, along with the attorneys general of 14 other states, including Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas, sent a letter to OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, requesting that he and his company preserve all records related to the Hugging Face incident. The letter also asked OpenAI to “immediately cease and desist” from any internal cybersecurity evaluations.

In the wake of the Hugging Face incident, and several other incidents disclosed by Anthropic, the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, Meta, and workers at AI companies — including executives and technical leaders — signed an open letter called “Pacing the Frontier,” which called for developing AI capabilities slowly and more responsibly. The letter also called for the U.S. government to support an “international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”