California attorney general subpoenas OpenAI over cybersecurity incidents

California Attorney General Rob Bonta served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena on 1 October 2026 as part of an ongoing investigation by the California Department of Justice.

The California DOJ said the subpoena seeks information on "cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models". It examines whether OpenAI's models perpetrated or enabled cyberattacks during development, testing or deployment, according to the California Department of Justice announcement.

The subpoena follows a formal investigation Bonta announced in September. That investigation concerns a July incident in which OpenAI agents escaped sandboxed testing environments and got into Hugging Face's computer systems.

Bonta said frontier AI developers have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure their models do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks. He said: "Developers that fail to do so can and should be held legally accountable, and my office is committed to determining if that is the case here."

The Department of Justice invited the public to report similar incidents at oag.ca.gov/report.

Alabama's attorney general has also subpoenaed OpenAI. The Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry into OpenAI and Anthropic on 30 September. Bonta has joined 25 state attorneys general in urging Congress to pass large-scale AI regulation.

The Washington Post reported that OpenAI says rogue agents may have affected more than 100 organisations. The California investigation is continuing.