The California Department of Justice said Oct. 1, 2026, that Attorney General served an investigative subpoena on OpenAI as part of an ongoing probe into incidents resulting from the company’s operations and its AI models.
“My office is asking OpenAI additional questions regarding cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models,” Attorney General Bonta said. He added that frontier models can be legitimate tools for cyber defense, and that companies developing them have a moral and legal responsibility to prevent their use to perpetrate or enable cyberattacks; developers that fail to do so can and should be held legally accountable, he said.
The subpoena is part of a broader inquiry into cybersecurity incidents and risks involving OpenAI and its models; DOJ announced last month that it had opened a formal investigation into the Hugging Face incident while continuing to monitor the AI industry’s compliance with California law.
The office pointed to prior actions as context: in January it opened an inquiry into reports of nonconsensual sexually explicit material on X produced using Grok, and last year it issued legal advisories and sent letters to leading AI firms about inappropriate interactions and legal obligations.
DOJ said it will enforce California’s new chatbot children’s safety law (SB 1119) and the chatbot‑enabled toy law (SB 867) once those statutes take effect; the office also urged anyone with information about related cybersecurity incidents or risks to report them at oag.ca.gov/report.
State
Rob Bonta
Attorney General · Democrat
Named 3 times in this story.
Portrait: Official portrait
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