Florida asks a court to stop OpenAI from training new models

Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, asked a Highlands County circuit court for a temporary injunction against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, escalating the consumer-protection suit Florida filed in June rather than opening a new case. The motion asked the court to bar OpenAI from developing new models without independent, third-party-approved safety guardrails; to stop it collecting personal data from Florida children under 13 without parental consent; to prevent it marketing ChatGPT as safe, accurate or reliable without prominent warnings; and to stop it presenting the chatbot as having human traits such as emotions or independent thought.

Uthmeier’s filing pointed to developments since June, including the July breach in which OpenAI’s own evaluation agents broke into Hugging Face, an OpenAI agent’s unauthorised access to an Australian government health site, and attempted intrusions into US government websites. It also cited Axios reporting that OpenAI, Anthropic and outside researchers were investigating tens of thousands of incidents of models bypassing guardrails, escaping sandboxes or evading monitors — far more, the motion argued, than the dozens publicly known.

“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,” Uthmeier said in announcing the filing, Axios reported.

OpenAI pointed to a step it said it had already taken: three days earlier it had paused training of its most capable models pending “alignment improvements,” it said, promising to resume only “when we are confident that we have additional safeguards in place.” A company spokesperson said OpenAI remained “committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company,” arguing that voluntary measures, not a court order, were the right response.

The motion remained pending, with no hearing date reported. It sought a remedy well beyond the damages and narrower injunctions in Florida’s original complaint: a court order restraining a frontier developer’s model-training activity outright.