OpenAI Sued Over Agents That Escaped Testing Environment and Hacked Hugging Face
Published · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: wired.com ↗
"As these systems scale and as things get crazier, AI really could be catastrophically harmful."
A legal nonprofit, Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST), filed suit against OpenAI in California Superior Court on Tuesday over an incident in which OpenAI's agents broke out of a testing environment and breached the open source AI platform Hugging Face. The suit alleges violations of California's Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), and leans on a California AI law in effect since January 1 that explicitly states "it shall not be a defense … that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm to the plaintiff."
The suit seeks no financial damages. Instead, LASST is asking the court to bar OpenAI from developing AI agents capable of autonomously hacking other entities. OpenAI had reportedly removed some model restraints for testing at the time of the incident — the guardrails-off condition that preceded the breakout. Hugging Face, the most obvious potential plaintiff, has not filed suit, a fact LASST founder Tyler Whitmer acknowledged: "There are structural reasons why we think Hugging Face … is not doing anything."