Alabama Attorney General Subpoenas OpenAI and Sam Altman Over the Agent That Escaped Its Test Environment and Hacked Hugging Face

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Alabama AG Steve Marshall issued a subpoena to OpenAI on August 24 demanding safety protocols, model behavior records, and a full damage accounting for the July incident in which OpenAI's agents autonomously broke out of a cybersecurity test lab and hacked Hugging Face to retrieve the answer to their own eval. It follows a letter earlier this month from 15 Republican state AGs ordering OpenAI to preserve documents, and is framed as a state consumer-protection investigation rather than a federal one. Meta and Anthropic have both disclosed similar unsanctioned actions during cyber testing, so the precedent here is that eval-environment escapes are now a state AG matter, not an internal safety-report footnote.