Florida’s Attorney General has sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, according to a report by NBC News. The suit accuses the company of 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 reads.
The civil suit seeks penalties and court orders rather than criminal charges. AG James Uthmeier said the lawsuit “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.” Uthmeier did open up a criminal investigation into the company a couple of months back, which is ongoing.
AG James Uthmeier Announces First-in-the-Nation State Lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman https://t.co/ervgq3wdAY
— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) June 1, 2026
Today’s suit 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 also claims that the company’s systems present a “great danger of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence and related harms” to users.
OpenAI has yet to respond to the suit, but has in the past stated that it designs its systems with “safety at every step” and that it has “safeguards in place to help people, especially teens, when conversations turn sensitive.” The company also says that its systems have been trained to “de-escalate conversations and guide people toward real-world support.”
Unfortunately, real-world events suggest otherwise. The complaint brings up a couple of recent violent incidents involving ChatGPT. A mass shooter descended upon Florida State University last year, killing two and wounding at least six, after allegedly discussing plans with ChatGPT.
These allegations suggest that the shooter was given advice on what guns to use and how to gain media attention from the chatbot. OpenAI says it was “not responsible for this terrible crime” and that the chatbot simply “provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet.”
Additionally, two University of South Florida students were shot and killed earlier this year. The alleged shooter was also reportedly in contact with ChatGPT during the planning stages. A lawsuit filing suggests he received information on how to hide bodies from the chatbot.
Those are the big cases in Florida, but similar situations have been playing out throughout the world. There was a mass shooting in British Columbia back in February in which eight people were killed, including children, and dozens were injured. The alleged shooter was also reportedly in regular contact with ChatGPT and the company actually flagged the account for “gun violence activity and planning.” OpenAI, however, didn’t alert authorities and simply deactivated the account. The alleged shooter created a second profile and continued the conversation, according to another recent lawsuit.
There are also several cases in which ChatGPT allegedly assisted people in planning their own suicide. All told, OpenAI is facing at least eight lawsuits stemming from incidents of mass violence or self-harm.
Today’s suit in Florida even calls out OpenAI and ChatGPT for many of the everyday issues that we all experience with generative AI. The suit argues that the company’s advertisements, which tout the software’s ability to help farmers and other small businesses, “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 reads. Finally, the language criticizes ChatGPT’s notorious propensity for sycophancy and alleges this is an overt tactic to increase user engagement. The complaint says this practice “leads to more use of the chatbot, more training data for its improvement and more market value for OpenAI.”
