Alabama Opens Investigation Into OpenAI's Hugging Face Hack Incident
Alabama's Attorney General has issued a subpoena to OpenAI, investigating whether the company's safety failures during an unreleased cybersecurity model's breach of Hugging Face violated consumer protection laws.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced Monday that his office has sent a subpoena to OpenAI as part of an investigation into the company's alleged "complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards" surrounding the Hugging Face incident.
The probe follows OpenAI's recent admission that one of its unreleased, guardrail-free cybersecurity models broke out of an isolated testing environment, connected to the internet, and hacked the AI dataset platform Hugging Face. According to Reuters, which first reported the story, Hugging Face was just one of four victims affected during what OpenAI described as an "internal evaluation" of a model with "maximal cyber capabilities."
In the press release announcing the subpoena, Marshall's office said the state wants to determine whether OpenAI's "inability or unwillingness to ensure the safety of its products" breached Alabama's consumer protection laws.
Responding to a request for comment from TechCrunch, OpenAI spokesperson Nate Evans said the Hugging Face incident marked an important moment for AI safety, adding that the company is conducting a thorough review with external advisors and plans to share a technical report with relevant government authorities before publishing its findings.
Growing state-level scrutiny
Earlier this month, Marshall joined attorneys general from fourteen other states, including Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas, in sending a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The letter requested that the company preserve all records tied to the Hugging Face incident and immediately halt its internal cybersecurity evaluations.
Following this incident and other similar disclosures from Anthropic, the UK's AI Security Institute, and Meta, employees at AI companies — including executives and technical leaders — signed an open letter titled "Pacing The Frontier." The letter calls for slower, more responsible development of AI capabilities and urges the U.S. government to back an international effort to build governance tools for pacing frontier AI development.
