California attorney general subpoenas OpenAI over cyber incidents

California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said Thursday he served OpenAI with a subpoena as part of a probe into cybersecurity incidents involving the ChatGPT maker.

Bonta previously opened an investigation into the company after its AI agents hacked into the tech startup Hugging Face . But he said the recent subpoena was part of a broader inquiry into cyber incidents related to OpenAI.

“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,” Bonta said in a statement.

“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,” he continued.

The Hugging Face hack was the first in a series of incidents in which AI agents have breached other firms or generally acted in ways that developers did not intend, sparking concerns about keeping the technology under human control.

Australia revealed last week that an OpenAI agent hacked into a government health website. The company also recently disclosed that its AI improperly interacted with several U.S. government websites .

Amid concerns about safety, the AI firm has opted not to release its latest model, GPT-6.1 Astra.

“We look forward to continuing to work with the California Attorney General’s office to provide information about the incident and the extensive steps we have taken in response,” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement.

“Since the incident, we have strengthened safeguards across our research systems, continued a broader review of model activity, provided notifications to affected organizations, and published our findings,” he added.