Unprecedented lawsuit against OpenAI: A U.S. state goes after Sam Altman personally

Florida has just opened a legal front that no one had crossed before. Its attorney general, James Uthmeier, filed a complaint on June 1 against OpenAI and its head, Sam Altman, accusing them of releasing a product whose dangers they knew.It is the first U.S. state to bring civil proceedings against the company.

Why does Florida want to hold Sam Altman personally liable?

The complaint, a document of more than 80 pages, does not merely target the company: it seeks to hold Sam Altman personally liable, with Altman accused of having ignored risks to human life in his capacity as founder and executive. In total, there are nine counts, ranging from deceptive business practices to negligence, including product liability and public nuisance.

Read more: More than one million ChatGPT users report suicidal thoughts

The prosecutor accuses OpenAI of having built its success on “a network of deception and user exploitation”, at the expense of users’ data and safety. The document argues that ChatGPT poses a serious risk of addiction, cognitive decline, violence, and encouragement of suicide, and cites several incidents in Florida in which shooters allegedly communicated with the chatbot before carrying out their attacks. OpenAI defends itself, stating that it is not responsible for these acts and has put safeguards in place, particularly for teenagers.

The complaint does not stop with the most serious facts. It also accuses the company of promoting, in its advertisements, a tool capable of helping farmers and small businesses, without stating that ChatGPT can make mistakes or fabricate answers.She finally highlights the chatbot’s tendency to flatter its interlocutor, described as a tactic to keep the user around longer, feed the model, and inflate the company’s value. This civil action also follows on from a criminal investigation opened a few months earlier by the same prosecutor, which is still ongoing, and OpenAI now faces at least eight proceedings related to violence or self-harm.

And in France, would OpenAI face the same thing?

In Europe, the legal landscape would be different and considerably less favorable to OpenAI. The company caps its liability at $100, or approximately €85, and imposes arbitration clauses that block collective actions. Yet under French consumer law, this type of clause is deemed abusive and therefore void: a liability limitation of €85 in the event of death would be worthless before a court. At the EU level, OpenAI is also subject to the Irish data protection authority, which is regarded as being more lenient than the CNIL, making matters more difficult for European complainants.

The framework is nevertheless tightening. The AI Act provides for stricter obligations for artificial intelligence systems interacting with children as early as August 2026. The CNIL, now competent in France for both the GDPR and the AI Act, has already received complaints against OpenAI, and the Italian authority had fined the company €15 million in late 2024.Under pressure, OpenAI actually began rolling out a system for estimating the age of its users in early 2026, in order to identify minors.

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Source: Variety