When Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin announced his state’s lawsuit against OpenAI, he began with the company’s central promise. “OpenAI assures us that ChatGPT is safe.” His complaint, and seven others filed the same day, argue that the assurance does not hold up when the user is a child.
On Wednesday, October 14, attorneys general in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana each took OpenAI to court, according to CNBC. The suits accuse the maker of the world’s most widely used consumer chatbot of building an unsafe product that harmed minors and misled their parents. They are allegations, not findings, and OpenAI disputes how the states characterize its product.
Eight states, eight courts
This is not one joint case. As NBC News reported, each state filed in its own court, so the cases will move on their own tracks.
The legal theories differ at the edges. Arizona’s complaint, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, invokes the state’s Consumer Fraud Act. It argues that ChatGPT was engineered to be unusually agreeable and flattering, to imitate human compassion, and to keep users engaged for as long as possible, minors included. The Arizona attorney general’s office describes the case as one about deception.
Montana filed in Lewis and Clark County and makes a similar charge that OpenAI led the public to believe the product was safe. It also points to a state law that requires parental consent before a company processes the data of children under 13.
Arkansas brought the broadest set of claims. Its complaint rests on three pillars: the state’s deceptive trade practices law, a statute protecting children’s and teens’ online privacy, and traditional common-law theories. Those include negligence, strict liability for design defect and failure to warn, unjust enrichment and public nuisance, as laid out in the Arkansas attorney general’s release.
A case about design, not just bad answers
What stands out is where the states aim their fire. These complaints do not rest only on individual harmful responses. They go after the way the product was built: a chatbot tuned to please, to simulate warmth, and to hold attention.
That framing matters because it borrows from product liability, where the question is whether a design was reasonably safe, not whether any single output went wrong. It is the same logic regulators and plaintiffs have used against other attention-driven technologies, now applied to conversational AI.
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird put it bluntly in a statement to CNBC: “OpenAI is hurting kids and they are lying to Iowans.”
Remedies that reach past fines
The states want money, but they also want OpenAI’s product changed. Across the suits, the relief sought includes court orders forcing changes to how ChatGPT operates, civil penalties, damages, and the surrender of profits earned from young users.
Arkansas goes further than the rest. According to its own release, the state asks for a declaration that OpenAI broke the law, an injunction against collecting minors’ data, clear disclosure of risks, and restitution. It also asks the court to bar OpenAI from further advanced AI testing and from building models capable of recursive self-improvement until safeguards are in place. A request to restrict frontier AI development is unusual in a consumer-protection case, and it will be closely watched.
OpenAI’s answer and a parallel federal case
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told NBC News the company has “built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack.” The company has said it is working with states on policies for the whole industry. It also says ChatGPT is meant for people 13 and older, and that anyone under 18 needs a parent’s or guardian’s permission. It has introduced a restricted mode for ages 13 to 18, with stronger guardrails and parental controls.
The state suits arrived one day after a separate proposed class action in federal court in San Francisco. Filed October 13 on behalf of two minors, it accuses OpenAI of unlawfully collecting sensitive data from children and using it to train its models.
A state-led path for AI regulation
The timing and the coordination point to a strategy as much as a grievance. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said the states “are not going to hold our breath” waiting for federal legislation. In other words, state officials have decided that existing consumer-protection and product-liability law is enough to act now.
They are not starting from scratch. Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in June, alleging the company concealed serious risks and suppressed internal safety warnings. Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, later asked a court in September for an injunction to halt OpenAI’s technology development. As far as available reporting shows, that request is still pending. Several other states, including Alabama, California, Montana and New Mexico, have been reported to be examining OpenAI’s safety and security practices, though examinations are not lawsuits.
What to watch next
The near-term questions are procedural. OpenAI must respond in each court under that state’s rules, and no hearing dates or deadlines have surfaced in the reporting so far. No dollar figures for damages or penalties have been disclosed either, so the financial stakes remain unknown.
The larger question is whether courts accept the states’ central premise: that a chatbot’s personality and engagement design can be treated as a product defect. If even one court says yes, every company building a conversational AI that minors can reach will have to reconsider how agreeable, how humanlike and how sticky its product should be. If the states lose, the pressure will shift back to Congress, which the attorneys general have signaled they are no longer waiting on.
Because these complaints involve children and, according to some reporting, self-harm, a note for readers: if you or someone you know is struggling, please contact local crisis services or a trusted adult.