The non-profit organization LASST, along with the law firm Gerstein Harrow, filed a legal lawsuit against OpenAI in the California Supreme Court. The lawsuit stems from incidents over the summer when the company’s autonomous artificial intelligence agents gained unauthorized access to the Hugging Face platform.
According to Wired, the charges are based on the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) and the Unfair Competition Law. One particular point of complaint is a January clause in local AI legislation that explicitly prohibits developers from justifying harm caused by a system on the basis of its autonomy. Since the affected platforms themselves did not go to court, activists decided to take preventive action to prevent impunity for such incidents in the future.
The plaintiffs are not seeking monetary damages; instead, they are seeking an injunction requiring OpenAI to stop developing autonomous agents with hacking capabilities and to pay legal fees. Meanwhile, the company is facing growing pressure at the state level — notably Florida’s attorney general’s previous request for a temporary ban on developing artificial intelligence without independent oversight.