Plaintiff Insists OpenAI Halts AI Development Over Third-party Interference
Non-profit group, Legal Advocates for Safe Science & Technology (LASST), which dragged artificial intelligence giant, OpenAI, to court for its models hacking other companies’ systems, is insiting that the American firm halts further AI development.
OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face in July 2026 spurred a lawsuit in which LASST is demanding that the company stop accessing third-party computer systems and halt AI development practices that can harm the public.
The non-profit group said on Wednesday that the hack in which OpenAI “agents stole credentials, uploaded malicious files, and gained control over key parts of Hugging Face’s internal systems… is unquestionably illegal under California law.”
California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) prohibits unauthorized access into computer systems, “and it doesn’t matter that a swarm of AI agents carried out this cyberattack. California law makes it clear that it is not a defense ‘that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm,’” the group said.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, said OpenAI also violated California’s Unfair Competition Law (UCL). “OpenAI’s insistence on externalising the harms of its unsafe decision-making is a fundamentally unfair business practice,” the complaint said, adding that “such risk-taking for private gain at substantial public expense is immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous, and substantially injurious conduct.”
LASST said it wants “a court order prohibiting OpenAI’s AI agents from accessing third-party computer systems without permission and forbidding OpenAI from continuing to employ unsafe AI development practices that threaten serious harm to the public.” The lawsuit does not ask for any compensatory or punitive damages from OpenAI, requesting only attorneys’ fees.
However, OpenAI said in a statement in response to the suit, which it said lacked merit, maintained that “Hugging Face was a serious incident and we’ve taken a series of actions in response to it, but this lawsuit is completely without merit.”
Defending its response to the hack, OpenAI noted that it published a technical report and other information about “third-party impact from misaligned models,” slowed development of its AI, and held back the release of a model that doesn’t meet its safety standards.
But LASST said OpenAI’s voluntary response was not good enough and that the firm should be subject to court-imposed restrictions.
“A business practice that exposes third parties and the public to uncontrolled, self-directed intrusions by systems that OpenAI admits it cannot fully predict or contain is unfair under any weighing of its utility against its consequences,” the group said.
LASST’s lawsuit said OpenAI quickly resumed training and evaluations of AI systems after the Hugging Face hack and other security incidents.
“OpenAI will continue to train and evaluate advanced models, without proper oversight, in sandboxes that are vulnerable to exploitation by those models,” the lawsuit said.
A New York Times reported on Wednesday that OpenAI executives ignored employees who warned months before the Hugging Face hack that the company’s newest models were not being appropriately monitored.
Photo caption: Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks at the OpenAI DevDay 2026 conference, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
