OpenAI Gets Sued Over the Hugging Face Hack

A legal nonprofit sued OpenAI in a California court on Tuesday over the company’s agents escaping a testing environment and hacking the open source AI platform Hugging Face. “OpenAI’s actions straightforwardly violated California law,” the suit alleges.

The suit was filed by Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST) and the law firm Gerstein Harrow in California Superior Court in San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered. It alleges that OpenAI’s agents violated California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) by breaching Hugging Face over the summer. The suit, which comes amid ongoing disclosures across the industry of agents going rogue, claims that OpenAI should be held responsible for the activity given a California AI law in effect since January 1 that says “it shall not be a defense … that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm to the plaintiff.”

“We think it’s extremely important that existing laws are enforced to hold AI companies accountable for the harm they’re causing,” Tyler Whitmer, founder of LASST, tells WIRED. “Especially when that harm is caused by autonomous agents, because we see that as an obvious, extremely risky thing in the world that’s very new.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, Florida attorney general James Uthmeier filed for a temporary injunction against OpenAI to block development of models without independent oversight, amid a lawsuit Florida brought in June against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. OpenAI “asked the government to tie them to the mast. Well, Florida is answering their cries for help,” Uthmeier said in a statement.

LASST and Gerstein Harrow brought the lawsuit under California’s Unfair Competition Law, which requires that LASST allege both how its work and resources were impacted and diverted as a result of the Hugging Face incident, as well as unlawful activity by OpenAI.