- Florida launches legal action against OpenAI for safety concerns and marketing a harmful product to children.
- The lawsuit follows similar cases against tech giants, showing a shift toward courts holding AI companies liable for user harm.
- Florida seeks age verification, parental consent for minors and mandatory risk disclosure requirements for ChatGPT.
Florida is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman for marketing a product that the company allegedly knew was unsafe, state Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on Monday.
“OpenAI and Altman,” said Uthmeier, “ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians.”
The lawsuit claims that the company aggressively marketed its product, ChatGPT, to the public while concealing serious risks.
Uthmeier said that the solution could require significant alteration to OpenAI’s programming and billions in reparations.
A mass shooting at Florida State University in 2025 and multiple suicides contributed to Florida’s decision to pursue legal action.
OpenAI released a statement saying that minors “need significant protection” but said that the company has implemented “industry-leading protections and policies.”
Mass shooting, suicides led to the lawsuit
On April 17 of last year, then-20-year-old Phoenix Ikner shot and killed multiple people on the Florida State University campus.
Court documents revealed that in the hours leading up to the shooting, Ikner consulted ChatGPT to plan the attack.
Last month, the family of Tiru Chabba, one of the people killed in the shooting, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for the role ChatGPT played in the shooting.
The lawsuit claimed that the conversation Ikner held with the chatbot “would have led any thinking human to conclude he was contemplating an imminent plan to harm others.”
“If this was a human being on the other side of the screen,” Uthmeier commented on the case, “we would be charging them with accessory to commit murder.”
Another lawsuit filed by Florida in April questions if the company “bears criminal responsibility” for the shooting.
In the newest lawsuit, Florida claims that “vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide,” and others have been subject to “public humiliation” due to the company’s services.
Among other grievances, the court filing lists the loss of critical thinking skills and addictions developed by minors as additional reasons for the lawsuit.
OpenAI says ChatGPT did not encourage FSU shooting
In response to Florida’s actions, OpenAI released a statement detailing what it does to protect users.
“We built safety for minors directly into our products,” the company stated, “including … an age prediction tool … and giving parents tools to monitor their kids’ use of AI.”
The company also stated last year that the mass shooting at Florida State University “was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime.”
“In this case,” the company continued, “ChatGPT provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity.”
On Monday, OpenAI’s biggest competitor, Anthropic, filed to become a public company. OpenAI has been working with bankers, according to The Wall Street Journal, to go public as well.
The lawsuit presents OpenAI with another obstacle in its competition with Anthropic.
Potential changes to AI products
The lawsuit notes that the free version of ChatGPT “[does] not require any parental consent from users” and lacks “any age verification requirements.”
OpenAI is also accused of “designing, offering and maintaining a dangerous online product where harmful information such as tips on eating disorders, self-harm, and mass murder are readily available, including to young children,” the filing reads.
Potential changes to the product could include age verification for children, parental consent requirements and increased safety measures surrounding data collection.
Further, the state requests that the company be required to directly disclose the risks of ChatGPT.
The lawsuit follows a wave of landmark lawsuits against other tech giants such as Google, Meta and Snap Inc. Courts have begun holding companies increasingly liable for harm to their users.