Florida Becomes First State to Sue OpenAI and CEO Over ChatGPT Safety Harms

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed an 83-page civil lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on June 1, 2026, making Florida the first U.S. state to sue the company behind ChatGPT. At a press conference announcing the action, Uthmeier stated that he expects other states to follow, and characterized the filing as a response to what he described as OpenAI's choice to prioritize commercial growth over the safety of its users.

The complaint contains ten counts, including deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence, violations of product liability laws, fraudulent misrepresentation, and causing a public nuisance. Florida is seeking $10,000 per violation — an amount Uthmeier said could reach billions of dollars in total — and is naming Altman as an individual defendant, not just as the head of a corporation. The lawsuit accuses the company of presenting ChatGPT as safe and reliable while knowingly failing to warn users about its risks, and of deploying the product to a mass consumer audience without age verification or mechanisms to alert parents when minors were using it. The free version of ChatGPT, the complaint states, has no gatekeeping or age verification of any kind.

The lawsuit draws heavily on several specific incidents. Florida is running a parallel criminal investigation into a 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University in which two people were killed and the shooter allegedly consulted ChatGPT before the attack. The complaint also references the February 2026 mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, where an 18-year-old killed eight people. That case carries particular weight because OpenAI's own systems flagged the Tumbler Ridge shooter's account in June 2025 — eight months before the attack — for activity related to gun violence planning. OpenAI deactivated the account but did not notify law enforcement, stating later that the account did not meet its threshold for a credible or imminent threat. Sam Altman personally apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community in April 2026; families of seven victims have filed separate federal lawsuits against OpenAI. The Florida complaint also cites a Florida teenager, Sam Nelson, who died in May 2025 after ChatGPT allegedly provided advice on combining drugs, and references cases involving alleged suicide facilitation. OpenAI denied that ChatGPT was responsible for the Florida State University shooting, stating the chatbot provided factual responses to questions using information available across public sources. The company said it has put industry-leading protections in place for minors but did not detail those measures beyond referencing an age detection system introduced in January 2026.

It is important to note several things this lawsuit does not yet establish. The specific content of ChatGPT's conversations in the incidents cited — what was actually asked, what was actually answered — has not been made public, making independent assessment of the allegations impossible at this stage. The legal pathway Florida intends to use to navigate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has historically shielded internet platforms from liability for content generated through their services, is not detailed in publicly available reporting. Whether AI-generated outputs count as platform content or as a manufactured product under existing law is genuinely unsettled, and no court has issued a binding ruling on the question.

On social media, the lawsuit generated competing frames that were more binary and emotionally charged than the news coverage. The dominant online narrative, amplified by Florida officials, conservative accounts, and mainstream outlet aggregation, focused on children's safety and specific victim stories, with some posts framing the action as holding Big Tech accountable for deaths. A parallel thread centered on OpenAI's commercial scale — the company was valued at $852 billion after raising $122 billion in March 2026 — and used lawsuit language about an AI arms race to frame this as a profit-versus-safety story. A lower-volume but present counternarrative, concentrated in tech commentary circles, characterized the lawsuit as regulatory overreach that could create unworkable liability standards for AI and stifle development. The regulatory overreach perspective received notably less engagement than the harm-focused frames.

The lawsuit arrives at the end of a specific political sequence in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis proposed an AI Bill of Rights in December 2025 and attempted twice in 2026 to pass AI regulation through the state legislature; both attempts failed after pushback from the Trump administration and technology industry lobbyists. When the legislative route closed, enforcement through the Attorney General's office became the fallback — a pattern that mirrors how states pursued tobacco, opioid, and social media companies after federal regulation stalled. Uthmeier, who previously served as DeSantis's chief of staff before being appointed Attorney General in February 2025, faces a Republican primary on August 18, 2026, approximately ten weeks after the lawsuit was filed.

The case now sits in Florida state court at its earliest stage. No hearing dates have been set and OpenAI has not yet formally responded to the complaint. The criminal investigation into the Florida State University shooting remains open with no charges filed. How other states respond — and whether coordinated multi-state litigation follows — is the most consequential open question in the story's next chapter.