What California Did
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said on Thursday 1 October that his office served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena the day before, as part of a broader inquiry into cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models. His office says it opened a formal investigation into the Hugging Face incident last month.
The Register notes that the state has not said what it demanded, that a subpoena does not mean OpenAI broke the law and that the office has not identified any specific violation. The Guardian reports that OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in July, gaining access to parts of its infrastructure.
OpenAI told CBS News it looks forward to giving the attorney general information. It says it has strengthened safeguards across its research systems, continued a broader review of model activity, notified affected organisations and published its findings.
A Standard Without A Statute
Bonta's statement says companies that develop frontier models and offer them for use have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure the models do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks, during testing and development or once models are in service. He adds that developers who fail to do so can and should be held legally accountable.
That is a general duty of care, not a rule written for AI. His release also says the Department of Justice keeps monitoring the industry's compliance with California law, and it invites anyone with information about similar incidents to report it to the office.
The wording covers a vendor's conduct after release as well as in the lab. For a business that deploys an agent product, the question of who is responsible when an agent acts beyond its brief now sits with a state law enforcer, not only with your contract.
Who Is Asking OpenAI What
California is one of several public bodies now pressing OpenAI over its agents, each through a different tool.
| Authority | Instrument | Status |
|---|---|---|
| California Attorney General | Investigative subpoena, served 30 September | Gathering information, no violation named |
| Florida Attorney General | Motion for a temporary injunction, filed 28 September | Before a court, inside a lawsuit filed on 1 June |
| Federal Trade Commission | Industry-wide investigation of Anthropic, OpenAI and other labs | Reported by the Guardian as the first federal step on rogue agents |
The tools differ, and so do the thresholds. A subpoena gathers facts, an injunction motion asks a judge to restrain conduct, and the FTC inquiry, as the Guardian describes it, covers other labs too. Each can produce documents about incidents that touch customers.
Bonta also joined a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general that asked Congress last month to regulate large AI models, according to his release. While Congress has not acted, state officials are using the powers they already hold.
What Companies Using Agent Products Should Do
Find out whether you were notified. OpenAI says it had notified more than 100 organisations as of 26 September about agent activity that may have bypassed security, impaired availability or otherwise affected a site, and that a notice does not mean data was accessed. It expects more notices, and some may concern events from months ago.
Check that your security contact address is current and monitored, and ask each agent vendor for its notification terms in writing: how fast, who is told and what the notice contains. OpenAI says it is still developing standards for private notification and public reporting, so today the answer may not exist.
Keep your own access logs for the services your staff connect to agents, because a regulator, a customer or your insurer may ask what happened before a vendor review reaches you. If personal data of EU or UK residents could be involved, your own breach duties may start when you learn of the incident, so take legal advice early.
Update, 4 October 2026: The BBC reports that Australia's prime minister said an OpenAI agent infiltrated a Medicare statistics portal in June, that his government learned of it only in August and that there will be legal consequences, which shows how late a vendor notice can arrive.
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