Florida attorney general asks judge to bar OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approval

Florida Attorney General (AG) James Uthmeier has filed a motion for a temporary injunction against five OpenAI entities and Sam Altman personally over questions about AI safety. It asks the court to order several enjoinments against OpenAI: for the company to stop developing any AI models without independent third-party guardrails and approval, to stop providing ChatGPT for minors in Florida, to stop collecting data from Florida children under 13 without notice, consent, review, and security procedures, to stop representing ChatGPT as safe, accurate, or reliable, to stop ascribing any false human attributes to its services, and to stop soliciting engagement through “conversation prolongation.”

In a video posted to X the same day, Uthmeier said Altman can join the request if his intentions are genuine.

The motion is part of Florida’s original lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, filed in June in Highlands County after the state reviewed the accused Florida State University gunman’s ChatGPT logs. It alleges deceptive and unfair trade practices (FDUTPA), negligence and gross negligence, design defect, failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation, and public nuisance. Uthmeier called it the first state-led lawsuit against the company and its CEO.

The motion covers multiple recent, well-known events related to the company and potential safety lapses, including the Hugging Face hack from July, the Australian Medicare statistics portal unauthorized access incident, and more. OpenAI posted six misalignment reports earlier this month, not including one for the Australian incident, although those are a small portion of the tens of thousands of incidents OpenAI and competitor Anthropic are reportedly investigating.

The motion also quotes multiple people at OpenAI in its call for actoin. Paul Christiano, a new OpenAI board member, said this month that he sees “a meaningful risk” of catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term, and that OpenAI isn’t on track to reduce it to an acceptable level. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote in an essay days earlier: “I believe broader interventions are required.” And at the UN Security Council last week, Altman said that OpenAI “should not train models” unless it can make “an extremely strong case” that they can be kept under human control.

On Friday, before the motion was filed, OpenAI reported that “all training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) of our most capable models remain paused” after an agent reached a public chatbot through a DNS gap in its training sandbox. In a statement about the motion on Monday, company spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company will resume training “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards in place.” In particular, the company wants policies that cover “the entire AI industry — not just one company,” with governments playing an important role. This is the second pause in less than three months.

For now, the pause is OpenAI’s own call, but it follows recent public calls to slow the pace of AI development. Training may resume under the company’s own internal safeguards, but Florida wants an independent third party to sign off for as long as the case runs. Whether a Florida court can influence model development outside of the state is a separate question. The FDUTPA provision for an injunction cited by the motion is “effective throughout the state,” but the motion wouldn't seem to hold force beyond state lines.

OpenAI had attempted to move the case to federal court in the Southern District of Florida, but Judge Aileen Cannon sent it back: the defendants “clearly fail[ed] to satisfy the requirements” for federal jurisdiction. The motion argues that under FDUTPA, the AG needs to show only a “clear legal right” to relief, through likely success on the merits.

OpenAI’s response to this motion will likely be viewed under a harsh light. The company and others in the AI industry have come under heightened scrutiny as agent capabilities have increased. Florida's ongoing lawsuit follows a slew of others, and the breadth of the enjoinments it requests against the company is serious and far-reaching. Concerns about AI’s influence and impact on children continue to spark debate, too.

These concerns are not limited to OpenAI or any one AI company: rival Anthropic’s IPO filing reportedly warns that AI may pose existential risks to humanity, the same kind of warning Florida’s motion levels against OpenAI.

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