Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed an 83-page civil complaint against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman personally on June 2, 2026, making Florida the first state to sue the company over the alleged dangers of ChatGPT to children. Filed in Highlands County Circuit Court, the suit asks a judge to bar OpenAI from collecting data from users under 13 without verified parental consent — a direct challenge to how the world’s most widely used chatbot handles the accounts of its youngest users.
The complaint combines product liability, negligence, and deceptive trade practices claims, arguing that OpenAI released a product it knew was unsafe for minors while marketing it as appropriate for general use, including in schools. Uthmeier’s office argues the company built an addictive product with no meaningful parental oversight, collected behavioral and conversational data from children without the consent Florida law requires for minors, and continued doing so even as internal safety concerns were allegedly raised and set aside.
A Complaint Built on Specific Harms
Unlike narrower privacy complaints, Florida’s filing ties its data-collection claims to a list of alleged real-world harms, including accusations that ChatGPT played a role in incidents involving self-harm, suicide, and what the complaint describes as public humiliation of minors, as well as a broader claim that heavy use erodes critical thinking skills in developing users. By folding the privacy allegations into this harm narrative, the state is betting that evidence of psychological and behavioral injury will make the case for restricting data collection practices more persuasive to a jury than a standalone technical privacy violation would be.
Going After Altman Personally
Perhaps the most aggressive element of the suit is Uthmeier’s effort to hold Altman personally liable, not just the corporation. The complaint accuses Altman of showing an utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firm’s conduct, a framing meant to pierce the usual corporate liability shield and put individual executive accountability for AI safety and data practices squarely in play. Uthmeier put it plainly in a public statement: Sam Altman and ChatGPT, he said, have chosen the AI race over the safety and security of kids. Legal observers note this personal-liability strategy, if it survives early motions, could change how AI executives weigh safety trade-offs against competitive speed going forward.
OpenAI Pushes Back
OpenAI has not conceded the core allegations. In response to the suit, the company pointed to what it called industry leading protections and policies for younger users, including a more restricted teen experience and parental monitoring tools rolled out over the prior year. The company added, with notable restraint, that it knows pointing to this work will not bring a child back, but that it remains committed to getting this right — an apparent reference to specific cases cited in litigation against the company, including separate wrongful-death suits working their way through courts elsewhere. OpenAI has consistently maintained that its safety investments are substantial and ongoing, even as it faces a wave of litigation testing whether those investments came too late or were too narrowly scoped.
The Skeptic’s Case
Not every technology-law observer thinks the suit is on solid legal footing. Some attorneys covering the case for business audiences have cautioned that Florida’s product liability theory applied to a conversational AI system is largely untested, and that courts may be reluctant to treat a chatbot’s outputs the same way they’d treat a defective physical product, given First Amendment and Section 230-adjacent questions about speech-like outputs. These critics argue the stronger, more durable claim is the narrower data-privacy one — the demand for parental consent before collecting a minor’s data — precisely because it mirrors well-established law like COPPA rather than asking courts to extend product liability into genuinely novel territory.
What’s Next
Florida’s suit now joins a fast-growing docket of state actions against AI chatbot companies, following Kentucky’s suit against Character.AI months earlier and parallel multistate investigations into OpenAI’s data and advertising practices. Whatever a Highlands County judge decides on the data-collection injunction specifically could become a template other state attorneys general copy, especially those in states that, like Florida, lack a comprehensive privacy statute but do have consumer protection law broad enough to be pointed at AI products marketed to minors.
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