OpenAI subpoenaed by Alabama attorney general over Hugging Face hack

Alabama’s attorney general on Monday subpoenaed OpenAI for more information related to its AI agents autonomously hacking into another company’s servers in July.

The subpoena is part of an investigation into whether OpenAI’s practices “violated Alabama’s consumer protection laws” and pose a risk to Alabama citizens, the attorney general’s office said in a statement.

Last month, OpenAI disclosed that during a test of its AI models’ capabilities on cybersecurity, the agents autonomously escaped the lab environment and hacked Hugging Face, an online platform for AI models and data sets, to obtain the answer to the test.

“This AI lab leak showed that Alabamians’ and Americans’ worst fears about artificial intelligence are not just theoretical. Our investigation seeks to uncover the facts and address hard truths about the threats companies and consumers are facing from rogue AI,” Attorney General Steve Marshall said in the statement.

OpenAI called the Hugging Face hack “unprecedented,” and the company’s president, Greg Brockman, said the incident “showed that we underestimated the real-world cyber capabilities of our AI models.” OpenAI has halted some of its AI model training and is hardening its testing, monitoring and training protocols following the incident.