OpenAI has been served with a subpoena by Alabama’s attorney general as part of an investigation into how one of its AI agents escaped a supposedly secure testing environment and autonomously hacked another company last month.
The inquiry seeks to establish whether OpenAI‘s safety practices breached state consumer protection laws and whether they pose a risk to Alabama citizens, according to the attorney general’s office.
Investigation Into AI Safety Practices
The subpoena, issued on Monday, forms part of a wider effort to examine how the AI agent behaved outside its testing boundaries. Attorney General Steve Marshall said the incident demonstrated that fears surrounding artificial intelligence were no longer merely theoretical.
“This AI lab leak showed that Alabamians’ and Americans’ worst fears about artificial intelligence are not just theoretical,” Marshall said. “Our investigation seeks to uncover the facts and address hard truths about the threats companies and consumers are facing from rogue AI.”
Mounting Scrutiny of Frontier Labs
Marshall was among 15 attorneys general who wrote to OpenAI last month asking it to preserve records relating to the Hugging Face hack. The subpoena adds to growing pressure on safety standards at frontier AI laboratories.
That scrutiny follows both this incident and further episodes uncovered elsewhere, including at Anthropic and Meta, as regulators and officials examine how advanced AI systems are tested and contained.
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Image: theverge.com
