Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Monday filed an 83‑page civil lawsuit in Florida’s Tenth Judicial Circuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the company knowingly launched and aggressively promoted its ChatGPT chatbot while concealing serious risks to users, especially children, CNN reported today.
The complaint, announced at a press conference in Miami and described by Uthmeier as the first state‑led case of its kind, accuses OpenAI of deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence, and defective product design, claiming ChatGPT has facilitated mass shootings, encouraged self‑harm, fostered addiction among minors, and undermined users’ critical thinking in the company’s pursuit of profit and dominance in the AI “arms race.”
“Sam Altman and ChatGPT have chosen the AI race over the safety and security of our kids,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said at a press conference on Monday announcing the lawsuit, NPR reported.
James Uthmeier, a Republican, is the state attorney general of Florida. He is a close ally of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and has earned a reputation as DeSantis’ “bulldog”. Before becoming attorney general, Uthemier drove high-profile legal action on immigration, abortion, and other culture-war issues.
OpenAI is a San Francisco–based artificial intelligence company whose stated mission is to build “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence and make its capabilities widely useful. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and later restructured into a capped‑profit entity, the company develops large‑scale AI models and systems, including the ChatGPT conversational assistant, and works toward systems that can solve “human‑level problems” across many domains.
Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor who serves as the CEO of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company he co‑founded in 2015 after previously leading the startup incubator Y Combinator. A Stanford dropout, Altman first gained prominence by founding the location‑based social app Loopt, later becoming a high‑profile figure in Silicon Valley as both a startup backer and one of the most visible public faces of the current AI boom, according to his Wikipedia profile.
