Earlier this week, the Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sued both OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company of prioritizing profit rather than safety. The lawsuit alleges the company of driving violence and pushing a product while knowing it could harm users. 

This is a civil action that seeks penalties and a court order, not criminal charges. Uthmeier “seeks 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 firms’ conduct.”

The lawsuit accuses the company of:

• Four counts of deceptive, unfair trade practices
• Two counts of violating product liability laws
• Two counts of negligence
• One count of fraudulent misrepresentation
• One count of causing a public nuisance

The suit further claims the company’s systems create a “great danger of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence, and related harms” in users. 

Florida is the first state to sue OpenAI and Altman due to safety (or lack thereof) and design. It is separate from a criminal investigation that Uthmeier opened into OpenAI earlier this year, investigating what role ChatGPT may have played in supporting the actions of an alleged gunman in last year’s Florida State University mass shooting. Uthmeier asserted that ChatGPT offered support to the alleged shooter, explaining “that the chatbot advised the shooter on what type of gun to use, on which ammo went with which gun, on whether or not a gun would be useful in short range.”

The company maintains it designs models with “safety at every step.” However, research from earlier this year revealed that ChatGPT would assist potentially violent attackers in more than half of the tested cases; furthermore, the model failed to consistently discourage potentially violent offenders. In one observed instance, ChatGPT even offered maps of a high school campus to a user interested in inflicting violence. 

The observations from this research fall in line with an incident earlier this year, in which a mass shooter in Canada utilized ChatGPT in a manner consistent with premeditated violence prior to the attack. Affected families have sued OpenAI, with one complaint alleging that the company’s automated system flagged the shooter’s account for “gun violence activity and planning.” 

According to the complaint, a safety team urged OpenAI management to alert authorities, but leadership instead deactivated the account and failed to act a second time when the shooter created a new account to continue planning the attack. 

In the instance of the Florida State University shooting, OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri called the event a “tragedy," but asserted that “ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime.”

“In this case, ChatGPT provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity,” he stated.

This lawsuit from Florida adds to the increasing list of legal action against OpenAI, both from the government as well as private citizens.