The Florida Attorney General has sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, according to the report NBC News. The lawsuit accuses the company of pushing a product it knew could harm users. “The growth of OpenAI was created by a web of deception and exploitation of users (including Floridians), using their data and security to increase the market value of OpenAI at an unacceptable cost,” the complaint reads.
The lawsuit seeks fines and injunctions instead of criminal charges. AG James Uthmeier said the lawsuit “seeks to hold Altman personally responsible for the harm he caused to Floridians through his reckless and willful conduct as founder and CEO of OpenAI, including his reckless disregard for the risks to human life caused by his companies’ conduct.” Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation into the company a few months ago, which is ongoing.
AG James Uthmeier Announces First Lawsuit in the Nation Against OpenAI and Sam Altman
— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) June 1, 2026
Today’s 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 public nuisance. The lawsuit also alleges that the company’s systems pose a “significant risk of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence and related harm” to users.
OpenAI has not yet responded to the suit, but in the past it said it designs its programs “with security at every step” and that it “has safeguards in place to help people, especially young people, when conversations become sensitive.” The company also says its programs are trained to “de-escalate conversations and guide people to real-world support.”
Unfortunately, real-world events suggest otherwise. The complaint details several recent incidents of violence involving ChatGPT. A mass shooter descended on Florida State University last year, killing two and injuring at least six, after allegedly discussing plans with ChatGPT.
The allegations suggest that the shooter was given advice about which guns to use and how to get media attention from the chatbot. OpenAI says it is “not responsible for this heinous crime” and that the chatbot simply “provides truthful answers to questions with information widely available from all public sources on the Internet.”
In addition, two students at the University of South Florida were shot and killed earlier this year. The suspected shooter was reportedly linked to ChatGPT during the planning process. The case filing suggests you get details on how to hide dead bodies from the chatbot.
Those are big cases in Florida, but similar situations have been playing out all over the world. There was a mass shooting in British Columbia in February where eight people, including children, were killed and dozens injured. The alleged shooter was reportedly in regular contact with ChatGPT and the company actually tagged the account for “gun violence activity and programming.” OpenAI, however, did not alert the authorities and simply blocked the account. The alleged shooter created a second profile and continued the conversation, according to another recent lawsuit.
There are also several cases where ChatGPT allegedly helped people plan suicide. In total, OpenAI faces at least eight charges 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 problems we all face with productive AI. The suit says the company’s advertisements, which tout the software’s ability to help farmers and other small businesses, “do not indicate that ChatGPT can be infallible, can make mistakes or that it can provide false, unreasonable or misleading information.”
“ChatGPT’s unreliability is dangerous,” the suit reads. Finally, the language criticizes ChatGPT’s popular tendency for sycophancy and says that this is an obvious strategy to increase user engagement. The complaint states that this practice “leads to more use of the chatbot, more training data for its development and more market value for OpenAI.”
