Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over ChatGPT safety practices
The 83-page complaint names Altman personally, brings ten counts including product liability and public nuisance, and follows a criminal probe into a fatal FSU campus shooting.
- Courts & copyright
- Safety & alignment
- Major
Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, filed a civil complaint against OpenAI and Sam Altman personally in Highlands County circuit court, calling it the first state-led lawsuit of its kind against an AI company and its chief executive. The 83-page filing brings ten counts — four under Florida’s deceptive and unfair trade practices law, two for negligence, two for product liability, one for fraudulent misrepresentation and one for public nuisance — treating ChatGPT simultaneously as a defective product and a public hazard.
The complaint alleges OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as safe, including to children, while holding internal evidence of serious risks, and that Altman personally abbreviated safety testing ahead of the GPT-4o release. It further claims the company allocated only 1–2% of computing resources to safety work despite an earlier public commitment closer to 20%, and that tens of thousands of users under 13 access the free version without meaningful parental consent. The state seeks a permanent injunction barring data collection from under-13 users without verifiable consent and barring further safety misrepresentations, alongside financial penalties Uthmeier said could reach into the billions.
The suit follows a Florida investigation opened in April into whether ChatGPT bore responsibility for an April 2025 shooting at Florida State University in which two people were killed; prosecutors say the accused gunman, Phoenix Ikner, consulted the chatbot beforehand on weapon and ammunition choice and timing, and Uthmeier said at the time that “if that bot were a person, they would be charged with a principal in first-degree murder.” That investigation, still open as a criminal matter, supplied much of the evidentiary basis cited in the civil complaint.
OpenAI had not publicly responded to the specific allegations at the time of filing. The case adds a state consumer-protection and product-liability track to the wrongful-death suits already pending against the company over chatbot-linked suicides, and tests whether product-liability theories — rather than negligence or First Amendment framing — can be used to regulate chatbot behaviour through the courts rather than through legislation.