Eight States Sue OpenAI Over ChatGPT's Risks to Children

OpenAI is now defending itself against eight separate state lawsuits that accuse the company of endangering children and lying to the public about how safe ChatGPT actually is. Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana each filed their own complaints, as reported earlier by Reuters, and all of them lean on the same basic argument: OpenAI built a product it knew could hurt vulnerable users and sold it to the public anyway.

The complaints frame this as a consumer protection issue rather than a pure product liability one. Each state alleges that OpenAI violated local consumer protection laws by failing to warn customers about the risks ChatGPT posed, particularly to minors. As evidence, the lawsuits point to a string of existing cases filed by families of teens and adults who say the chatbot played a role in their loved ones' deaths.

That's the sharpest edge of the filings. The states argue OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as a "safe, youth-appropriate tool that puts safety first," while the product was, in their words, actually "dangerous to vulnerable users." The lawsuits get specific about what that danger looks like, alleging the chatbot contributed to "degrading critical thinking skills, encouraging paranoias and delusions, offering dangerous medical advice, and promoting unhealthy behaviors and relationships."

Beyond the mental health allegations, the states also take issue with OpenAI's data practices. They claim the company collected information from minors and didn't do enough to keep underage users off the platform in the first place. And in an attempt to show a pattern rather than a one-off failure, the suits cite recent incidents involving AI systems being hacked or manipulated, framing them as further proof of what the complaints call OpenAI's "recklessness."

Arizona's filing goes furthest in characterizing how the company has changed. "OpenAI has devolved from its original mission as a public-first nonprofit that prioritized safety into a cautionary tale about what can happen when the development of a tool as powerful as AI is driven not by safety, but by a profit-at-all-costs mindset that sidelines essential safeguards," the lawsuit states. That line captures the core narrative all eight states are pushing: a company that started with a safety-focused mission and drifted toward growth at the expense of the guardrails it originally promised.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.

What the states are asking for

The relief each state is seeking is fairly standard for this kind of consumer protection action, even if the underlying allegations are not. The lawsuits ask courts to impose civil penalties on OpenAI and to order the company to stop making misleading claims about ChatGPT's safety. Some of the states are also asking for the deletion of any personal data they say was collected unlawfully, which would specifically target the data gathered from minors.

Notably, this isn't a single multistate action filed jointly. Each of the eight states brought its own separate suit, which means OpenAI is now facing eight distinct legal proceedings rather than one combined case. That structure gives each state control over its own litigation strategy and timeline, but it also means OpenAI could end up negotiating, settling, or fighting these allegations piecemeal across different courts rather than resolving the issue in one place.

Why this adds up to more than one lawsuit

What makes this moment notable isn't any single allegation. Companies get sued over product safety and consumer protection claims regularly, and AI chatbots in particular have already been the subject of individual wrongful-death suits tied to user harm. What's different here is the coordinated involvement of eight state governments simultaneously, treating the safety of a chatbot as a public enforcement matter rather than something left entirely to private litigation between families and a company.

That shift matters because state attorneys general carry tools that individual plaintiffs don't: the ability to seek civil penalties, demand policy changes, and force data deletion at scale. If even a few of these cases succeed, OpenAI could be looking at mandated changes to how it markets ChatGPT's safety features and how it handles data from younger users, not just damages paid to specific families.

It also lands at a moment when AI companies are under growing pressure to show that safety claims made in marketing match what's actually built into the product. The lawsuits' emphasis on the gap between OpenAI's "safety first" messaging and the specific harms described in the complaints is clearly designed to test that gap in court, state by state, rather than let it get resolved through settlement in a single case.

How OpenAI responds in the coming weeks, whether through a public statement, policy changes, or legal filings pushing back on the claims, will say a lot about how seriously the company is treating state-level pressure on this issue. With eight separate proceedings now underway, there's no single outcome to watch for. There are eight.