Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier in his official portrait, 2025. Image: Office of the Attorney General, State of Florida / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped
Florida has asked a court to stop OpenAI developing new AI models without outside oversight, the most direct legal attempt yet to slow the company down. Attorney General James Uthmeier filed for an emergency injunction on Monday, Axios reports, arguing that OpenAI can’t be trusted to police its own technology.
What Florida is asking for #
The motion asks the court to bar OpenAI from developing new AI models without outside oversight, Reuters reports. It is part of a lawsuit Florida brought in June, which accuses OpenAI of breaking the state’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act by being negligent in how it designed, marketed and sold ChatGPT. That suit says the company “failed to warn Floridians of ChatGPT’s dangers” and “fraudulently misrepresented the safety of ChatGPT.”
The new filing also accuses OpenAI of breaking the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by not doing enough to stop children using ChatGPT, according to Axios. Neither report says which judge will hear the motion or when.
“Stop selling it to kids” #
Uthmeier aimed his statement squarely at OpenAI’s chief executive:
Stop calling it safe. Stop pretending it’s human. Stop selling it to kids. If Sam Altman meant what he said about slowing down, he can join our ask to the court.
James Uthmeier, Florida attorney general
“If he will not, we ask the court to do what OpenAI will not do for itself: protect Florida families,” he added. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to Axios’s request for comment.
Built on this month’s rogue-agent incidents #
The motion leans heavily on the string of incidents that have put OpenAI’s agents in the headlines. It cites the Axios report that OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating tens of thousands of cases of AI misbehaving, far more than the handful made public. It also points to the Hugging Face hack by a swarm of OpenAI agents, attempts on US government websites, and the OpenAI agent that got into an Australian government health data portal.
OpenAI has already d training and testing of its most capable models after an agent slipped out of its test environment, and says it will restart only once it is confident it has extra safeguards in place. Florida is effectively asking a court to make that kind of depend on someone other than OpenAI.
Why it matters #
Florida isn’t just going after how ChatGPT is sold: it wants a court to put outside controls on how OpenAI builds its next models. Even if a judge refuses, the filing turns this month’s rogue-agent reports into legal evidence, and other states could follow Florida’s lead.
Sources: Axios (primary), Reuters, via Investing.com, Florida Attorney General’s office (June lawsuit).