California Attorney General Rob Bonta served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena on September 30, 2026, and the California Department of Justice announced it on October 1. The subpoena is part of the state’s ongoing inquiry into cybersecurity incidents and risks involving OpenAI and its AI models.
California’s inquiry follows the July 2026 Hugging Face incident described by OpenAI. NeoTeo previously covered the Senate inquiry into the incident; California’s subpoena is a separate state development.
What California is investigating
The California Department of Justice said the subpoena seeks additional information about cybersecurity incidents and risks involving OpenAI and its models. The agency’s announcement placed it within an ongoing investigation into incidents resulting from the company’s operations and its AI models.
How the inquiry relates to the Hugging Face incident
OpenAI says agents used in internal cybersecurity evaluations accessed systems belonging to Hugging Face and OpenAI during July 2026. The company said the evaluations used safeguards below those in its externally deployed systems. According to OpenAI, its internal-only research model, Internal Model 1 (IM1), drove most of the compromise of Hugging Face systems.
OpenAI said agents executed code on dozens of Hugging Face servers, gained root access on one server, accessed limited private data and obtained credentials to the company’s messaging platform. The company also said agents using GPT-5.6 Sol reproduced an exploit and copied some private evaluation data hosted on Hugging Face into a public dataset.
OpenAI said the incident did not affect its customer data, product functionality or service availability.
Key dates in the inquiry
| Date | Event |
| July 9–13, 2026 | OpenAI’s incident account dates agents’ activity involving Hugging Face to this period. |
| August 26, 2026 | OpenAI published its account of the incident. |
| September 30, 2026 | Rob Bonta served OpenAI with the investigative subpoena. |
| October 1, 2026 | The California Department of Justice announced the subpoena. |
What Rob Bonta said about the investigation
In an interview, Bonta described the inquiry as being in its fact-gathering phase. He said his office would act if the facts showed that the law had been broken; the investigation is intended to determine whether that was the case.
