Alabama Sends Subpoena to OpenAI Amid Safety Concerns

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Alabama Sends Subpoena to OpenAI Amid Safety Concerns
Photo: Gizmodo
tech· A press review of 4 outlets
  1. Alabama’s Attorney General announced Monday that it sent a subpoena to OpenAI as part of an investigation into the company’s alleged “complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards” in the Hugging Face incident.

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    The Verge

    OpenAI subpoenaed by Alabama AG over Hugging Face hack The state is investigating whether OpenAI’s ‘inability or unwillingness to ensure the safety of its products’ endangers citizens.

    Gizmodo

    OpenAI’s general attitude towards the fact that one of its AI models went rogue and hacked into the systems of the open-source AI platform Hugging Face has been, “That’s our bad, but you gotta admit, it’s pretty cool, right?” The Attorney General of Alabama’s answer to that is a pretty resounding “No.” On Monday, Alabama AG Steve Marshall announced that he had launched an investigation into the incident and is demanding that OpenAI respond.

  2. Last week, OpenAI did announce several changes to its safety protocols in response to the Hugging Face hack, which saw one of its unreleased models break containment and autonomously act to breach the other company’s systems, including stronger monitoring across its development processes—which might mean any monitoring, seeing as this incident somehow eluded OpenAI for about a week until it finally noticed.

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    TechCrunch

    The investigation comes weeks after OpenAI admitted that one of its unreleased and guardrail-free cybersecurity models had escaped an isolated environment, connected to the internet, and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face. As Reuters first reported, Hugging Face was only one of four victims of what was supposed to be “an internal evaluation” of a model with “maximal cyber capabilities,” as OpenAI put it.

  3. The company also called on California to strengthen its recently passed AI safety law, which requires transparency into the model training process. OpenAI reportedly wants the state to amend the law to include requirements that AI models be monitored during training for the possibility that the model could breach third-party systems.

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    TechCrunch

    In a LinkedIn post from the company’s global affairs team, OpenAI said California’s SB 53 “should be amended to expand safeguards,” for example by “requiring monitoring of frontier models under training or evaluation for potential serious incidents,” and by “strengthening cybersecurity protections throughout the model-development lifecycle.”

From the margins

4 details only one outlet reported

Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.

  1. 01 Gizmodo

    OpenAI is positioning the request as evidence that it’s serious about safety. But it’s also a bit of a cop out. It suggests that something like this wouldn’t have happened if someone had simply stopped them. Rather than, you know, just not doing it in the first place.

  2. 02 The Verge

    OpenAI says its new AI chip, Jalapeño, completes tasks more efficiently and returns responses faster than other AI systems, according to a blog post published on Tuesday. During a briefing with reporters, OpenAI hardware vice president Richard Ho said Jalapeño offers the “best of both worlds” with lower latency and higher throughput, as AI systems typically “have to make a trade-off between the two.”

  3. 03 TechCrunch

    Search engines were built and optimized for people, who can’t spare the time or attention required to scan entire webpages. But as people increasingly use AI chatbots to search the web and do tasks, there’s a line of thinking that the Internet’s current infrastructure needs to be updated to cater to AI instead, as these bots can read and process much larger portions of information.

  4. 04 ZDNet

    I use Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and other browsers on my desktops and laptops, both personally and professionally. As I want access to the same bookmarks, I need a way to sync them. Each browser has its own syncing method, but it works only within the system, not with other browsers. That's why I use a free and inclusive syncing tool called Floccus.

Assembled from 3 corroborated claims drawn from 4 independent outlets. Every passage above is taken verbatim — Dorothy doesn't paraphrase or summarize.

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Sources (4)

  • gizmodo
  • verge
  • zdnet
  • techcrunch

Original Articles (11)