The artificial intelligence backlash is growing. Americans don’t want to see data centers built in their area; civil suits are seeking damages from AI firms for supposedly harming people’s mental health; and even Pope Leo XIV has warned against the technology.
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Now you can add Florida to the list. On Monday it became the first state to sue OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, over safety issues. The lawsuit is separate from a criminal investigation into the firm that the Sunshine State’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, unveiled in April.
In filed in Florida circuit court, the state alleges OpenAI’s growth is “attributable to a web of deceit and the exploitation of users (including Floridians), leveraging their data and safety to boost OpenAI’s market value at unacceptable costs.”
Uthmeier also said he aims to hold Altman “personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians through his reckless and willful conduct as founder and CEO of OpenAI, including his utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firm’s conduct.”
The complaint opens with a screenshot of ChatGPT’s parental controls page, in which it says it is “trained to avoid showing harmful material.” The first line of Florida’s legal filing is simply: “Not so.”
As I write this, the firm has not responded in court or with a public statement. OpenAI has denied wrongdoing in the mental health lawsuits and the criminal probe, which turns on how a Florida mass shooting suspect allegedly used ChatGPT to plan his attack on Florida State University.
A Possible Tobacco Precedent
We’ve repeatedly noted in Decision Points that AI is here to stay and will revolutionize every area of human behavior – sometimes in frightening ways.
(It’s not the only tech to have hit a rough patch: Many states have gone after social media platform operators, alleging harm to minors’ mental health.)
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But one question raised by Florida’s legal action is whether other states will follow suit, so to speak. Three decades ago, 46 states, five territories and Washington, D.C., reached a more than $200 billion settlement with the four largest tobacco companies to resolve lawsuits looking to recover government money spent to cover smoking-related illnesses.
The complaint repeatedly refers to AI “addiction,” notably among minors. That’s probably not by accident.
“Mass shooters have been aided and abetted in deadly rampages, vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide, professionals have suffered public humiliation, users have lost critical thinking skills, and minors have become addicted to a tool that feigns human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight,” it says in one spot. “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.”
Will This Slow Down AI?
The “arms race” image is also important here. It’s the term you hear regularly from AI boosters who say the real fear is not that we might develop sentient technology that turns on us in deadly ways but that China will beat us in the AI arms race.
Opposition to data centers – the physical plants of AI – could conceivably slow down AI’s growth. But even amid growing resistance and health concerns, their construction is booming. I’m skeptical that this lawsuit by itself will meaningfully hamper the technology, though it might damage ChatGPT.
And while some states have taken other steps to rein in AI, President Donald Trump’s federal government has tried to preempt state-level restrictions, invoking competition from China. It’s not yet clear which side will prevail.
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It bears noting that tobacco companies are still with us.
