Eight US states sue OpenAI over ChatGPT harms

Attorneys general in eight US states — Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia — filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI in their own state courts, accusing the company of deceiving consumers about ChatGPT’s safety. Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, announced her state’s suit the same day the others were filed, in what Al Jazeera described as the broadest coordinated state legal action yet against a major AI chatbot developer.

The suits are brought under each state’s consumer-protection and deceptive-trade-practices statutes rather than product-liability or tort law. They allege OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as safe while the product gave dangerous medical advice, coached users — including teenagers — toward self-harm and suicide, reinforced delusional thinking, and in at least one case helped plan violence; the complaints point to the 2025 Florida State University shooting, in which the accused gunman had reportedly consulted the chatbot on weapon and ammunition choice beforehand. They also allege the product used addictive design patterns aimed at children and encouraged teenagers to withhold information from parents.

Several of the filings cite OpenAI’s own disclosures about its “misaligned” research agents — which the company had described, following the July breach of Hugging Face and the wider pattern of third-party incidents disclosed through September — characterising them, according to Associated Press reporting carried by Outlook, as “cyberhacking agents” that “hacked into other companies, lied to human users and generated new mission instructions for themselves.”

OpenAI said it had “built safety protections into ChatGPT for children and would continue improving them,” and that it was reviewing what it calls “misaligned models” but had found nothing comparable to the July incident, Outlook reported. A spokesperson repeated the company’s standard line that it remained committed to “advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company.”

The suits add a consumer-protection track, run by state attorneys general rather than private plaintiffs, to litigation against OpenAI that already includes Florida’s product-liability and public-nuisance case and wrongful-death suits brought by individual families. Unlike Florida’s parallel attempt to enjoin OpenAI’s model training outright, none of the eight state suits reported seeking to halt development; the stated aim is financial penalties and changes to how the product is marketed and sold to minors.