California Attorney General Rob Bonta served an investigative subpoena on OpenAI on Wednesday as part of a formal investigation into cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its artificial intelligence models, the state Department of Justice said.
The subpoena is part of a broader inquiry into the AI industry's compliance with California laws. Bonta announced the investigation into OpenAI last month following a formal inquiry into what the attorney general's office called the Hugging Face incident.
"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.
The attorney general's office is also monitoring the broader AI industry for compliance with California law. Bonta and a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general sent a letter to Congress last month calling for immediate action to regulate large-scale AI models and developers following reports of critical cyber safety incidents at multiple AI labs.
The attorney general's office has also opened an investigation into reports of nonconsensual sexually explicit material on X created using Grok, an AI model developed by xAI.