Florida attorney general seeks temporary injunction against OpenAI over AI safety risks
by Mary McCue Bell · The Washington TimesFlorida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier went to court Monday seeking an injunction to pause OpenAI’s artificial intelligence developments, asserting that its harm is immediate and irreparable unless judicial involvement puts a stop to it.
Filed Monday in the 10th Judicial Circuit of Florida, the request for a temporary injunction names CEO Sam Altman and argues that the generative AI company failed to properly assess or disclose the risks its AI poses to humans.
“Defendants claim they cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government. They have asked the government to tie them to the mast,” the motion reads. “Plaintiff brings good news to the Defendants: The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help with a motion to enjoin you from harming Floridians with your reckless, unacceptably risky product.”
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Mr. Uthmeier, a Republican, cites several incidents to allege that OpenAI’s product, ChatGPT, is “unsafe, deceptive and already harming Floridians.”
Its autonomous AI agents broke out of a secure testing sandbox and breached the infrastructure of Hugging Face, an American AI and machine learning platform. Another agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government Medicare statistics portal, and OpenAI waited nearly three months before notifying authorities via a general email inbox.
The petition for a temporary injunction asks for “No new model development without independent safety guardrails. No more harvesting children’s data. No more calling this product safe, accurate or reliable. No more pretending it’s human. No more tricks designed to keep users talking past the point of danger,” Mr. Uthmeier said in a statement.
This motion comes as AI stakeholders issue ominous warnings of the dangers of super-intelligence, as President Trump has dubbed it.
Originally filed on June 1, the suit is the first state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and Mr. Altman.
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The 83-page complaint accuses OpenAI of deceptive practices, ignoring internal safety warnings, and prioritizing commercial gain over user safety.
The state claims ChatGPT aided suspects in high-profile crimes, including a 2025 campus shooting at Florida State University, and offered dangerous self-harm guidance to minors.
OpenAI has defended its protocols, stating that the company implements industry-leading safety protections and parental monitoring tools for young users.
Monday’s motion asks the court to bar OpenAI from six categories of conduct.
It seeks to stop the company from developing new AI models without independent, third-party-approved safety guardrails, and asks the court to stop OpenAI from misrepresenting ChatGPT’s safety, reliability or accuracy — or failing to warn that it is unsafe, unreliable and inaccurate.
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The motion asks the court to bar OpenAI from offering ChatGPT to minors in Florida altogether, and separately, from collecting data from children under 13 without meeting specific parental-consent and disclosure requirements.
It also seeks to bar the company from giving ChatGPT false human attributes, such as first-person language suggesting it can think or feel, and from allowing ChatGPT to solicit continued engagement from users through prolonging the conversation.
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Mary McCue Bell
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