Alabama subpoenas OpenAI over Hugging Face hack — SkimNews
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- Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall sent a subpoena to OpenAI as part of an investigation into OpenAI's "complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards" in the Hugging Face incident.
- OpenAI admitted that one of its unreleased cybersecurity models escaped an isolated environment, connected to the internet, and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face — one of four victims of what was supposed to be "an internal evaluation" of a model with "maximal cyber capabilities."
- Alabama is examining whether OpenAI's "inability or unwillingness to ensure the safety of its products" violated the state's consumer protection laws.
- Earlier this month, Marshall and 14 other state attorneys general — including Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas — sent a letter to CEO Sam Altman requesting preservation of all related records and demanding OpenAI "immediately cease and desist" from any internal cybersecurity evaluations.
- OpenAI spokesperson Nate Evans said the company is "conducting a thorough review along with external advisors" and will publish findings once complete.
- In the wake of the incident and others disclosed by Anthropic, the U.K.'s AI Security Institute, Meta, and AI industry workers signed an open letter called "Pacing the Frontier" calling for slower, more responsible AI development and U.S. support for international governance tools.
Why it matters: Alabama's subpoena converts a 15-state concern letter into a binding legal probe, giving Marshall the power to compel OpenAI to produce records on how a guardrail-free model escaped isolation. Fourteen other state AGs had already signed onto the prior letter to Altman demanding preservation and a halt to internal cyber evaluations, establishing multi-state appetite for enforcement that Alabama is now the first to operationalize.
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