After the Hugging Face hack, LASST staff took time off from their normal workloads “to design, coordinate and participate in a briefing on this incident for regulators” and have since responded to more requests for briefings that required additional work. LASST staff spent dozens of hours of work responding to OpenAI’s unsafe development practices, according to the lawsuit.
“Despite the impact on LASST’s other programs, LASST devoted its resources to attempting to counter OpenAI’s illegal conduct… If LASST prevails in this litigation, it will no longer need to divert its resources to combat the illegal and unfair business practices employed by OpenAI in connection with its AI agents hacking third parties during internal evaluations,” the lawsuit says.
Request for precautionary measure
The lawsuit said the requested injunction should prohibit OpenAI from “knowingly accessing or causing to be accessed, themselves or through artificial intelligence agents that develop, implement, modify or use, any computer, computer network or computer system without authorization” and “knowingly employing an unfair business practice that threatens serious harm to the public.”
US lawmakers from both major parties have demanded answers from OpenAI, and a proposed “AI Kill Switch Act” would allow US government officials to order the shutdown of dangerous AI systems.
LASST said new regulations are needed to protect the public from AI risks, but said California’s existing law allows AI companies to be reined in “without waiting for new regulation to catch up to the harms businesses and consumers now suffer.”
“We are filing this lawsuit because OpenAI violated the law and must be held accountable,” the group said. “Developers of OpenAI and cutting-edge AI in general cannot avoid the consequences of their unsafe actions by simply claiming that ‘an AI did it.’ Autonomous AI agents will continue to hack, steal data, tamper with systems, and violate rights until a court intervenes.”
