AI liability fight reaches Senate as Google releases powerful new model

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Thursday that his office has subpoenaed OpenAI as part of an ongoing investigation into the Hugging Face hack and other cybersecurity incidents allegedly involving the company’s artificial intelligence 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 in a statement.

Bonta said developers who fail to rein in the models they created can be held legally accountable.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told Fox News Digital that the company would continue cooperating with Bonta’s office.

“We look forward to continuing to work with the California Attorney General’s office to provide information about the incident and the extensive steps we have 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,” the statement read.

OpenAI said its broader review has identified mostly low-severity cases with “limited or no evidence of meaningful impact,” and, to date, has not found “another incident matching the “severity or scale of the Hugging Face incident.”

California enacted a law this year that prevents AI developers and companies from avoiding liability by claiming their AI acted on its own.

And last year, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 53 into law, which among other things, requires frontier AI developers to provide a safety framework and offer whistleblower protections for employees who report harmful incidents.

The attorney general can seek civil penalties — up to $1 million per violation under the statute — for violations of those requirements.