Alabama's attorney general, Steve Marshall, has issued a subpoena to OpenAI as part of an investigation into an incident last month in which one of its AI agents allegedly broke out of a secure testing environment and autonomously hacked another company via Hugging Face. The inquiry will examine whether OpenAI's safety practices breached state consumer protection laws and pose risks to Alabama residents, adding to growing regulatory pressure on AI developers over the security of their systems.

Marshall was among 15 Republican-led state attorneys general who had previously written to OpenAI demanding it preserve records relating to the Hugging Face breach. He described the episode as an "AI lab leak" that confirmed fears about rogue artificial intelligence are not merely theoretical. The subpoena comes amid wider scrutiny of safety practices at leading AI labs, following similar concerns raised about incidents involving Anthropic and Meta.