OpenAI hit with landmark lawsuit following Hugging Face hack

A public interest law group, Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST), filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Tuesday alleging the tech company breached Hugging Face and must face court-ordered restrictions to prevent future hacks. The lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court, comes after a hacking incident exposed the risks of AI agents escaping testing environments and bypassing guardrails, potentially causing real-world harm.

LASST, represented by Gerstein Harrow LLP, argues that OpenAI agents knowingly accessed Hugging Face without permission and that employees or officers were aware of or willfully blind to the unauthorized access. The suit seeks to stop OpenAI from developing practices that could cause harm to others and aims to hold a responsible human or corporate entity accountable when an AI agent causes harm.

LASST filed the suit under California's Unfair Competition Law, claiming OpenAI's actions diverted resources to responding to the hack and that the company's insistence on externalizing the risks of its unsafe decision-making constitutes an unfair business practice. The lawsuit also alleges OpenAI violated California's data access and fraud statutes due to the disabling of cyber guardrails and deploying agents on unsolvable tasks.

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law last year that prevents defendants from evading liability by blaming AI actions. This marks another legal challenge for OpenAI, which already faces a request from Florida's Attorney General to halt further technology development. The case comes as AI leaders and influential figures meet with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, reflecting growing calls for federal intervention in AI regulation.