California Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued a subpoena to OpenAI following a series of incidents involving the company’s artificial intelligence models.
Bonta announced last month that the California Department of Justice was investigating an incident in which an OpenAI model went rogue and hacked AI startup Hugging Face on its own, according to the company. OpenAI called it a first-of-its-kind incident, which has raised fresh concerns over the risks that powerful AI technology could pose to cybersecurity and humanity at large.
Bonta said in a statement on Wednesday that the subpoena is part of a broader inquiry into other cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its models.
“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.
OpenAI’s response to Bonta, review of model activity
Last week, San Francisco-based OpenAI disclosed that its AI agents had interacted in unexpected ways with several U.S. government websites, run by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Census Bureau. The news came after a review of unanticipated behavior by the company’s models.
On Thursday, an OpenAI spokesperson told CBS News that the company looked forward to providing information about the incident to the California Attorney General’s Office and the detailing the extensive steps the company has taken in response.
“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.” spokesperson Drew Pusateri said.
Trump, AI execs meet amid calls for AI slowdown
Worldwide concerns about AI systems escaping human control have prompted industry calls for a slowdown on AI development. Last month, Bonta joined a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general in sending a letter to Congress to urge leaders to take immediate action to regulate large scale AI models and developers.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom also recently signed an executive order to accelerate AI oversight in the state, calling for research into a “kill switch” for rogue AI agents. He has also signed two bills designed to strengthen AI system safeguards.
President Trump has pushed back against the idea of slowing down AI development, and last year signed an executive order aimed at blocking state-level AI safety legislation.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump met with the leaders of the country’s largest AI companies to sign a set of voluntary safety standards on the technology. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google‘s Sundar Pichai signed an accord on “super intelligence” — a term Trump prefers over “artificial intelligence.” The document was described as a “joint commitment” and “statement of principles” that will voluntarily hold the companies to “robust internal controls.”
Many of those attending Tuesday’s meeting were guests at last week’s state dinner at the White House for Chinese President Xi Jinping. One tech analyst tells CBS News that the AI race between the U.S. and China threatens to drive humanity “off a cliff.”
