Florida Invokes Extinction Fears In Legal Bid To Halt OpenAI Development

Florida filed a motion Monday seeking a temporary injunction to halt OpenAI's development of what the state calls a "reckless, unacceptably risky product" absent "third-party approved safety guardrails," part of a civil lawsuit Florida originally filed in June alleging ChatGPT threatens Floridians' public safety. The motion cites the Hugging Face incident, recent misalignment cases involving unauthorized access attempts on Australian and US government servers, OpenAI board member Paul Christiano's statement on catastrophic loss of control, OpenAI's "An Alien Mind" essay, and an open letter from 1,300 AI industry employees, arguing OpenAI is "the greatest public nuisance ever created by the hand of man.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The state of Florida is seeking a temporary injunction to stop OpenAI from continuing to develop what it calls a "reckless, unacceptably risky product" without the deployment of "third-party approved safety guardrails." The new legal motion PDF , filed Monday morning, is part of a civil lawsuit the state of Florida originally filed in June, arguing that ChatGPT represented "a threat to the public safety of Floridians," specifically by preying on vulnerable populations like children and violent or delusional adults. ... In arguing for this injunction, the state points to the Hugging Face incident as well as recent high-profile misalignment cases involving unintended and unauthorized attempts to access Australian and US government servers. Florida also cites AI industry leaders, including many from OpenAI, in arguing that the AI industry is literally asking for this kind of outside regulation. The motion points to statements from Paul Christiano, who said on joining the company's board this month that he believes "there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term." The motion also points to OpenAI's own "An Alien Mind" essay and an open letter from 1,300 AI industry employees, both of which call for enforced slowdowns on frontier AI development, if necessary. Citing laws that allow the state to exercise control over companies that are a "public nuisance," Florida argues that OpenAI is "the greatest public nuisance ever created by the hand of man, capable of laying waste to global civilization." "It is only by the grace of the Almighty that one of Defendants' AI agents hasn't compromised a water supply or shut down a power grid -- yet," the state writes in the motion. Read more of this story https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/29/0514206/florida-invokes-extinction-fears-in-legal-bid-to-halt-openai-development?utm source=rss1.0moreanon&utm medium=feed at Slashdot.