TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida is accusing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of harmful and deceptive practices in a first-in-the-nation lawsuit against the maker of ChatGPT.
Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the lawsuit on Monday.
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Uthmeier says OpenAI released and aggressively marketed ChatGPT to the public while disregarding repeated warnings about user safety from inside and outside the company, and claiming the product was safe.
The suit lists the 2025 FSU mass shooting as an example of ways ChatGPT has proven to be an unsafe product, referring to the conversations Phoenix Ikner asked the program about operating a Glock handgun and how many people he’d need to kill to gain widespread media attention.
[RELATED: FSU shooting suspect used ChatGPT to help plan fatal attack, court records show]
The suit also lists examples where ChatGPT gave inaccurate information that could be dangerous, such as a Texas case where a teen died after taking kratom and Xanax, or another teen who died from suicide after conversations with ChatGPT. The lawsuit alleges the program even went so far as to write a suicide note for him.
The suit alleges that ChatGPT makes little effort to provide safeguards for minors, noting that the free version of the program has “no gatekeeping or age verification mechanism whatsoever” and no ability to inform parents about what conversations minors are having with the program.
“Every investigation into adolescent use of ChatGPT leads to the same result—it is designed to act like a friend to encourage use of the chatbot and then betrays any vulnerable adolescents to whatever frightening need they bring to their ‘confidant,’" the lawsuit says.
The Office of Statewide Prosecution launched a criminal investigation last month into OpenAI and its use in the FSU shooting. Uthmeier’s office says the criminal investigation is ongoing.
[READ the lawsuit below]