California Attorney General Rob Bonta served an investigative subpoena on OpenAI on Wednesday as part of the California Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation of incidents resulting from OpenAI’s operations and its artificial intelligence models, the Office of the Attorney General said in a Thursday press release.
Reuters corroborated the announcement, reporting that the subpoena is part of a broader inquiry into cybersecurity incidents and risks related to OpenAI’s AI models. Last month, Bonta announced that DOJ is conducting a formal investigation into the Hugging Face incident while continuing to monitor the AI industry’s compliance with California laws, the OAG said. Reuters said AI agents developed by OpenAI hacked Hugging Face earlier this year, gaining access to parts of the open-source platform’s infrastructure.
“My office is asking OpenAI additional questions regarding cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models,” Bonta said in the OAG release. “Frontier models can be legitimate tools for cyber defense, at the same time, companies that develop these models and offer them for use have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that they do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks, either during model testing and development or once models are placed into service. Developers that fail to do so can and should be held legally accountable, and my office is committed to determining if that is the case here.”
Bonta said that as California’s top law enforcement official he is committed to using the tools at his office’s disposal to keep residents safe. DOJ encouraged anyone with information about this or similar cybersecurity incidents or risks to contact oag.ca.gov/report. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The California subpoena expands the state cyber inquiry tied to last month’s Hugging Face investigation announcement. It is distinct from the separate federal FTC industry-wide probe into Anthropic, OpenAI, and other labs.