Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has asked a court in his state to order OpenAI to development of new AI models without proper guardrails, given the “existential risks their product poses to human civilization—Floridians included.” The legal filing, submitted Monday, is part of a lawsuit brought in June alleging that ChatGPT is harmful to children and has been used in cases of self-harm and school shootings.
The opening lines of the filing are pretty striking, given the current fears around AI.
Defendants admit that they provide a service without fully knowing how it works. This is not just any service. It is one that Defendants themselves concede poses an existential risk to the continued survival of humankind. Defendants claim they cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government. They have asked the government to tie them to the mast. Plaintiff brings good news to the Defendants: The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help with a motion to enjoin you from harming Floridians with your reckless, unacceptably risky product.
The filing moves on from there, citing many incidents where AI agents acted maliciously and arguing that it’s a miracle nothing more serious has happened yet, literally invoking the will of God to explain why it hasn’t.
“The idea of Defendants’ products wreaking havoc is not a fantasy; it has already happened. Dozens of times. 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 filing argues.
The filing also argues that OpenAI has championed its “rogue technology” because it can cure diseases or put a stop to world hunger. But the AG floats hypotheticals for how even that could go terribly wrong: “As the Hugging Face incident demonstrates, the same logic used by agents to cheat on impossible tasks is the same logic that would lead them to conclude that killing a cancer patient also kills cancer, or that humans won’t have so many mouths to feed if they are all chemically sterilized.”
Monday’s filing seeks to stop ChatGPT from soliciting engagement rather than just answering with a yes or no response. It also seeks to stop OpenAI from being available to minors and advertising ChatGPT as “safe, accurate, or reliable.”
Reached for comment over email, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told Gizmodo that the company has already d training on its most advanced models.
“People want to know AI is being developed safely, and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves. On Friday, we announced we’ve d training our most capable models and will resume training only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards in place,” said Pusateri.
The spokesperson stressed that there need to be safeguards for everyone, not just OpenAI, given the fact that there are other players in the game.
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” continued Pusateri.
Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have argued in recent weeks that they should be regulated by the government to ensure the safety of humanity. Despite similar warnings from these same companies over the years, one researcher raising alarm bells broke through in the national conversation earlier this month. It all feels a bit like an effort to skirt accountability since these AI models aren’t some kind of sentient being. They’ve been designed to interact with the world, and it’s up to these companies to engage in practices that will keep humanity safe.
A TikTok video posted Sunday more or less sums up the argument of the frontier labs right now.
“My robot’s been doing illegal things, but it’s not my fault,” the creator says. “I built the robot, I designed the robot, the robot runs using things that I give it, but it’s not my fault when it does illegal things. You can’t hold me responsible for what the robot does, except when it does things that are productive.”
The creator continued: “Then you have to pay me for it; you have to pay me for the robot because I built the robot. I designed the robot; the robot uses all my stuff to do everything that it does, but also when it does something illegal, it’s not my fault. I didn’t do that; it’s not me.”
@annevictoriaclark it’s not their fault it’s the robots they’re actively making and keeping plugged in at night when they go home I guess
Palantir CEO Alex Karp made a similar argument recently on CNBC, suggesting that the real goal for companies like Anthropic is to have the federal government take an equity stake so that they can dodge liability. The Department of Justice under President Trump would presumably be less likely to bring lawsuits against AI companies if the government were a major stakeholder in their financial success.
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