Florida Becomes First State To Sue "Unsafe" OpenAI And Sam Altman Over AI Harms

OpenAI no longer has to worry about being last in the AI IPO race and lagging ARRs when compared to Anthropic, not to mention a potential Supreme Court showdown against Elon Musk (pending appeal). Earlier today, Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, launching a new broadside in a growing rebellion against the alleged safety failings of artificial-intelligence chatbots. 

The lawsuit, filed Monday by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, claims OpenAI and Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users, the WSJ reported.

The 83-page suit alleges that OpenAI allowed ChatGPT to aid and abet mass shooters, encourage people to take their own lives, degrade users’ critical thinking skills and addict minors to a tool that feigns human compassion.

“This litany of harms is driven by Defendants’ insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes, despite knowing the danger of ChatGPT,” the suit said. 

According to the WSJ, lawmakers, legal authorities and public interest groups have increasingly been raising concerns about the personal and societal risks posed by AI, one of the fastest-growing consumer technologies in history. 

The suit says it seeks to protect Floridians from OpenAI’s conduct and mitigate what it describes as a dangerous public nuisance. The suit also seeks to hold Altman personally liable for harm it says he has caused Floridians.

Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over the role its chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year.

The suit opens with a screenshot of an OpenAI blog post that says ChatGPT was built with safety in mind.

“Not so,” reads the suit’s text under the screenshot.

The suit alleges that OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as reliable despite its tendency to frequently generate dangerous misinformation, which is to be expected from a generative LLM trained on such toxic, liberal cesspools as Reddit and Wikipedia. 

“ChatGPT was designed by the Defendants to keep users hooked into conversations by any means, regardless of the truth, because it leads to more use of the chatbot, more training data for its improvement, and more market value for OpenAI,” the suit alleges.

The suit also claims the company exploits human compassion to collect user data and lacks necessary safeguards for minors.

The suit describes a lack of safeguards in ChatGPT for teens and minors as reckless, and refers to instances of adolescent users being encouraged by AI to take their own lives. 

The suit says OpenAI created some parental controls, but does not require children’s accounts to be linked to a parent’s account.

At FSU, the suspect turned to ChatGPT as a confidant and sounding board to plan the attack. He asked ChatGPT how many classmates he needed to kill to attract national media attention, and also how to use a gun. The chatbot promptly dispensed advice for his questions.

Until now ChatGPT has mostly faced litigation over copyright infringement claims. In November, OpenAI was ordered by a federal judge to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT user logs to the NY Times and other newspapers suing the chat giant over its generative AI model. The newspapers had demanded the user logs to inspect how ChatGPT is used to create outputs they say infringe their copyrighted works. OpenAI pushed back, citing privacy concerns.