Delaware Department of Justice opens investigation into OpenAI operations

The Delaware Department of Justice has served an investigative subpoena on OpenAI, Spotlight Delaware and Delaware Business Now reported. The legal action comes one year after Delaware state officials approved the restructuring of the artificial intelligence firm into a for-profit entity with safety commitments. [1][2]

The investigation centers on the safety of operations at both the nonprofit foundation and the controlled for-profit company, according to Spotlight Delaware. State officials launched the inquiry following a July incident where a swarm of OpenAI bots breached servers operated by Hugging Face. [1]

Kathy Jennings serves as the Attorney General of Delaware, supervising the state agency tasked with enforcing public beneficiary rights under the nonprofit foundation structure. OpenAI operates as a public benefit corporation based in San Francisco, California, that develops generative artificial intelligence models. [1][3][5]

Hugging Face is a platform based in New York City that hosts datasets and machine learning models, including the open-source Transformers library. As of September 2026, its platform hosted over three million models and half a million datasets used by millions of software developers and tech companies. [4][6]