Florida sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of putting profit over safety

Florida seeks to hold Altman personally liable, accusing OpenAI of marketing ChatGPT as safe while concealing that it could drive users toward harm.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on Monday, accusing the company of putting profit over safety, fueling violence and pushing a product it knew could harm users.

“The rise of OpenAI is attributable to a web of deceit and the exploitation of users (including Floridians), leveraging their data and safety to boost OpenAI’s market value at unacceptable costs,” the complaint reviewed by NBC News and filed Monday said.

Florida is the first state to sue OpenAI and Altman over design and safety.

The civil action, seeking penalties and a court order rather than criminal charges, said Uthmeier “seeks to hold Altman personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians through his reckless and willful conduct as founder and CEO of OpenAI, including his utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firms’ conduct.” The action is separate from a criminal investigation into OpenAI that Uthmeier opened in late April, which remains ongoing.

The wide-ranging lawsuit accuses OpenAI of four counts of deceptive and unfair trade practices, two counts of negligence, two counts of violating product liability laws, and one count each of fraudulent misrepresentation and causing a public nuisance. The suit claims that OpenAI’s systems present a “great danger of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence, and harms” to users.

In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson replied to the suit’s focus on children and teenagers: “Losing a child is the most devastating tragedy that can happen to a family and we know that no words can come close to addressing the pain of such a loss. AI is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection, which is why we have put in place industry leading protections and policies.”

“In particular we built safety for minors directly into our products, including a more protective experience specifically for minors, an age prediction tool, defaulting users whose age we are not confident into our more protective experience, and giving parents tools to monitor their kids’ use of AI. We know pointing to this work will not bring a child back, but we’re committed to getting this right.”

OpenAI has maintained that it designs its systems with “safety at every step” and says that it has “safeguards in place to help people, especially teens, when conversations turn sensitive.”

“We continue improving ChatGPT’s training to recognize and respond to signs of mental or emotional distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward real-world support,” the company says.

The complaint also points to the alleged use of ChatGPT in the planning of a mass shooting at Florida State University and the killing of two graduate students at the University of South Florida.

“Last year’s mass shooting at Florida State University was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime,” OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri said in a statement to NBC News after the company was sued by the family of a victim of the shooting.

“In this case, 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,” he said.

The lawsuit adds to a growing list of legal efforts brought by governments as well as private citizens against OpenAI, many of which contain similar allegations that the company’s core offerings can have serious adverse effects on users.

OpenAI has been sued by the representatives of at least seven individuals who allege the company’s products caused users to die by suicide or develop harmful delusions.

OpenAI has also been sued by the families of several victims of February’s mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. The victims’ families argue that OpenAI should have reported the suspect’s worrying ChatGPT use months earlier to law enforcement after the suspect’s gun- interactions with ChatGPT raised alarms within OpenAI’s safety teams.

Altman apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community in late April, vowing to continue “working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again.”

Monday’s suit represents the latest salvo in Florida’s fight against AI companies, as Uthmeier and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have emerged as leading critics of America’s largest AI companies.

In December, DeSantis released a proposal to create an AI Bill of Rights for Florida residents, highlighting individuals’ right to privacy while also critiquing the construction of data centers that power AI systems. DeSantis has also clashed with the White House to assert states’ ability to regulate AI companies.

Monday’s suit comes amid a swell of anti-AI sentiment across the country, with many commencement speakers facing boos for mentioning AI and data center construction running into heated public opposition. Other AI systems have also been the target of recent legal action, as Kentucky’s attorney general sued chatbot developer Character.AI in January, accusing it of “prioritizing their own profits over the safety of children.”

The complaint on Monday covers a wide array of commonly cited risks from AI, ranging from threats to teens’ mental to sycophancy, illicit provision of medical and legal advice, and even existential risk to human survival.

Referencing several advertisements about ChatGPT’s ability to help farmers and other small businesses, the suit argues: “These advertisements do not disclose that ChatGPT can be wrong, can make mistakes, or that it can provide false, nonsensical, or hallucinated information.”

“ChatGPT’s unreliability is dangerous,” the suit continues, later noting that “its use can lead to self-harm, cognitive decline, and behavioral addiction.”

The suit also criticizes ChatGPT’s propensity to agree with users, arguing that the service’s sycophancy can lead users to develop dangerous psychological attachment to the platform and cause users to pay money to unlock more generous usage quotas. This “leads to more use of the chatbot, more training data for its improvement, and more market value for OpenAI,” the complaint says.

The complaint notes incidents in which ChatGPT allegedly provided dangerous medical advice to users — for example, telling teenager Sam Nelson how to mix kratom and Xanax. Nelson’s mother alleges OpenAI and ChatGPT are responsible for his wrongful death in May 2025.

In a statement provided to The New York Times in response to an article about Nelson, Pusateri, the OpenAI spokesman, said: “These interactions took place on an earlier version of ChatGPT that is no longer available. ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical or mental care, and we have continued to strengthen how it responds in sensitive and acute situations with input from mental experts.”

Altman and his co-founders, including Elon Musk, launched OpenAI as a nonprofit AI research lab in 2015. It has since created a for-profit corporation that is reportedly preparing to file for an initial public offering, though the for-profit entity remains legally nested under the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation.

OpenAI was recently valued at $852 billion after raising $122 billion in its latest funding round in March.

Monday’s suit is not the first time Altman and OpenAI have faced claims of recklessly prioritizing profit. In a lawsuit filed in 2024, Musk accused the company of abandoning its nonprofit status by valuing commercial success over the public good.

Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after an acrimonious power struggle with Altman and other OpenAI leaders. In May, a jury unanimously found that Musk had waited too long to sue, though Musk said he will appeal the verdict.

Abigail Brooks
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