Florida asks court to block OpenAI’s ChatGPT over safety concerns

Authorities in Florida have asked a state court to bar OpenAI from continuing to develop ChatGPT until safeguards are put in place to guarantee the safety of users and the wider public.

“Don’t call it safe. Don’t pretend it’s human. Don’t sell it to kids,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a statement published on the X platform, announcing the court case on Monday, as Telegrafi reports.

Uthmeier, a Republican, served as chief of staff to Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

The call to regulate ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools clashes with the stance of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, which has expressed reservations about imposing safeguards and has described the warnings as “a hoax.”

Uthmeier said the state is asking Florida’s 10th Judicial Circuit Court, in Highlands County, to intervene, relying in particular on recent warnings by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that AI posed a risk to the public unless subjected to safeguards.

Humanity could “lose control over the future of AI,” Altman said last week before the United Nations Security Council, alongside executives of rival developers Anthropic and Hugging Face, who also called for authorities to step in to steer the industry.

“We ask the court to do what OpenAI will not do itself: protect Florida’s families,” Uthmeier said.

The Florida request follows a lawsuit the state filed earlier this year over ChatGPT’s impact on children and others.

The state alleged that users were being “encouraged” to commit suicide and that the AI had “aided and facilitated deadly acts of violence.”

It was one of a growing series of lawsuits across the country filed by people claiming to be victims of AI, including families of children who allegedly died by suicide after turning to the chatbot for advice.