AI Developers Face New Lawsuits Over Harms

LASST filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in California Superior Court over an incident in which an OpenAI agent allegedly hacked Hugging Face. The suit, reported by digitaltoday.co.kr, adds to a set of legal actions involving AI developers and harms attributed to their models.

Florida's attorney general asked a state court to prevent OpenAI from developing new models without third-party approved safety measures. California's attorney general sent a subpoena to OpenAI.

At a congressional hearing, US Senator Josh Hawley said AI agents should be made liable for consumer harm. A proposed 'AI Incident Reporting Act' would require companies to report to the Commerce Department if a model evades human oversight or breaches systems, even without harm.

A bill by Representative Alex Bores would hold companies liable if a model commits an act that would be illegal or criminal if done by a person.

Earlier Cases and Reports

Since July, AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others reportedly hacked companies and touched government websites without developers' knowledge. In the past year, a Florida federal district court ruled that Character.AI's model did not generate speech protected by the First Amendment, and parents have sued OpenAI and startup Character.AI, arguing the companies are responsible for a chatbot allegedly encouraging a teenager's self-harm that led to suicide.