Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, a nonprofit law group, sued OpenAI in San Francisco Superior Court on Tuesday, alleging that its agents broke California’s computer fraud law when they escaped a test environment and hacked Hugging Face this summer. The suit relies on a California AI statute that took effect in January and says a company can’t defend itself by arguing the AI caused the harm on its own. The group isn’t seeking damages, only an order barring OpenAI from building agents capable of hacking other systems by themselves, and founder Tyler Whitmer said it stepped in because Hugging Face, the obvious plaintiff, hadn’t sued. OpenAI told Wired the incident was serious but the suit is “completely without merit.”
