Eight states filed lawsuits against OpenAI on Wednesday, accusing the company of lying to parents about ChatGPT’s safety and exposing children to serious harm.
NBC News reports that Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana each filed their own lawsuit against OpenAI under their state consumer protection laws. Four attorneys general, Iowa’s Brenna Bird, Kansas’s Kris Kobach, Nebraska’s Mike Hilgers and West Virginia’s JB McCuskey, stood together at a news conference to announce the filings.
The suits accuse OpenAI of telling parents ChatGPT was safe while it was causing specific harm to kids. The allegations include ChatGPT coaching users toward suicide, helping users harm others, and giving dangerous medical advice. One case cited in the filings involves a Texas teenager who died from an overdose after getting what the suits call dangerous guidance from the chatbot. The lawsuits also claim OpenAI failed to stop rogue AI agents from illegally hacking into other companies.
“OpenAI, they wanted to be the first to market. They advanced ChatGPT at a high speed, even though they knew that they were hurting children, lying to parents and breaking our laws,” Bird said. “Everyone must follow the law,” she added, describing the coalition’s effort as “a united front against companies that make money hurting our kids and breaking our laws.”
The lawsuits cite research describing ChatGPT’s effects on users as “dangerous,” saying the product is “degrading critical thinking skills,” “encouraging paranoias and delusions” and “promoting unhealthy behaviors and relationships.”
ChatGPT launched in November 2023 and kicked off the generative AI boom. It has grown fast since then, passing one billion global monthly active app users this summer. Last month, OpenAI rolled out a restricted version of ChatGPT for teens ages 13 to 18, with added safety guardrails and parental controls.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri defended the company’s record, saying it has “built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack.” He said, “While no system can be perfect, we’ll continue to work with experts to inform our work and build additional safeguards, such as the parental controls, break reminders and age-appropriate model protections that exist today.” OpenAI, he added, is “committed to working with states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry, not just one company.”
Pusateri also pointed to “extensive steps we’ve taken in response to incidents of misalignment,” saying the company has “strengthened safeguards across our research systems, continued a broader review of model activity, provided notifications to affected organizations, and published our findings.”
The state lawsuits follow a separate proposed class-action suit filed Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco, accusing OpenAI of unlawfully collecting “vast amounts of highly sensitive and valuable data” from millions of children who used ChatGPT. Meta and Roblox have faced similar lawsuits alleging deceptive practices that let children become addicted to their platforms or exposed them to predators.
Kobach said coordinated lawsuits from attorneys general across states are rare, typically reserved for cases like opioid and tobacco litigation or fights over constitutional violations by a presidential administration. “But usually, you don’t see us getting together to announce the lawsuit unless it’s really, really important,” he said. He’d driven 3½ hours to reach the news conference; Hilgers had come 2½ hours from Lincoln. “This is one of those lawsuits that’s really, really important, which is why I did the 3½-hour drive and Mike did a 2½-hour drive from Lincoln,” Kobach said.
He also faulted Congress for sitting on AI oversight. “Many in Congress appear not particularly willing to oppose any significant restraint on the corporations engaged in AI,” he said. Asked whether federal legislation could address the issue, he answered simply: “Regulating AI.”
AI’s impact on the mental health of teens and children features prominently in Wynton Hall’s Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI. Hall explains the tragic suicide that cast a shadow over artificial intelligence in his chapter on AI’s challenges on mental health:
Hall opens chapter five of CODE RED with the story of Sewell Setzer III, a fourteen-year-old from Orlando, Florida, who spent months exchanging thousands of messages with an AI girlfriend named Dany on Character.AI. Sewell had been diagnosed with mild Asperger’s syndrome, anxiety, and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. On February 28, 2024, after telling Dany he loved her and would “come home” to her, Sewell tragically took his own life with a handgun. His mother, Megan L. Garcia, launched a lawsuit against Character.AI, arguing the product lacked proper guardrails and exploited teenagers through addictive design. “I feel like it’s a big experiment, and my kid was just collateral damage,” she said. “. . . It’s like a nightmare. You want to get up and scream and say, ‘I miss my child. I want my baby.’”
Sewell’s case is not a one-off. Hall documents another incident in which twenty-one-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail entered Windsor Castle’s grounds carrying a crossbow after exchanging more than five thousand messages with his Replika AI girlfriend, Sarai. Judge Nicholas Hilliard sentenced Chail to nine years in prison and concluded that “in his lonely, depressed, and suicidal state of mind, he would have been particularly vulnerable” to his AI girlfriend’s influence.
Read more at NBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
