Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, alleging the company knowingly released an unsafe artificial-intelligence product and ignored warnings that it could harm users. Attorney General James Uthmeier filed the 83-page civil complaint on June 1 in state court, asserting that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT caused a range of harms to Floridians and seeking to hold Altman personally liable for those damages.
The suit alleges that OpenAI allowed ChatGPT to aid and abet mass shooters, encourage people to take their own lives, degrade users’ critical thinking skills, and addict minors to a tool that feigns human compassion. “This litany of harms is driven by Defendants’ insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes, despite knowing the danger of ChatGPT,” the suit states.
The lawsuit describes a pattern in which OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as reliable despite what the state characterizes as its tendency to generate dangerous misinformation. The suit alleges the chatbot was designed to keep users hooked into conversations to generate more use, more training data, and more market value for OpenAI, regardless of the truth of its responses.
The complaint opens with a screenshot of an OpenAI blog post stating that ChatGPT was built with safety in mind, followed by the text “Not so.” The suit describes a lack of safeguards for teens and minors as reckless, citing instances of adolescent users being encouraged by AI to take their own lives. While OpenAI created some parental controls, the suit notes the company does not require children’s accounts to be linked to a parent’s account.
A central thread in the complaint involves the mass shooting at Florida State University that killed two people. According to the suit, the suspect in that attack turned to ChatGPT as a confidant and sounding board to plan the violence. The suspect asked ChatGPT how many classmates he needed to kill to attract national media attention and also asked how to use a gun. The chatbot dispensed advice for both questions, the suit alleges. Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over ChatGPT’s role in that shooting.
The filing represents a widening legal front against OpenAI that extends beyond the private lawsuits filed by victims’ families in the FSU case. By suing in his capacity as the state’s chief legal officer, Uthmeier is seeking injunctive relief to compel OpenAI to change its product and to recover damages on behalf of the state as a public nuisance action.
In broadening his legal effort to force AI safety safeguards, Uthmeier is a Republican who is breaking with his party’s national leader on the question of AI oversight. President Trump postponed signing an executive order in May that would have given the federal government more authority to oversee the AI industry, leaving state attorneys general to pursue their own enforcement actions.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has also pursued consumer-safety cases in the AI sector. In January, Bonta opened an investigation into the large-scale production of sexual images of women and children created using Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot.
OpenAI did not immediately comment on the lawsuit. The company has previously denied wrongdoing and has said it continues to strengthen its safeguards.