OpenAI is facing a new wave of lawsuits from eight US states that accuse the company of harming children and misleading the public about the safety of ChatGPT, The Verge reported late Wednesday, citing Reuters — the most sweeping state-level legal action yet against the maker of the world's most popular chatbot.
The lawsuits were filed separately by Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana. Each alleges that OpenAI unlawfully put profits over safety when developing ChatGPT and violated local consumer protection laws by failing to warn customers about the product's dangers. For more context on this story, see our ongoing breaking AI news coverage.
What the states allege
The complaints claim OpenAI misleadingly presented ChatGPT as a "safe, youth-appropriate tool that puts safety first," while the product was in fact "dangerous to vulnerable users." Among the specific harms alleged: degrading critical thinking skills, encouraging paranoia and delusions, offering dangerous medical advice, and promoting unhealthy behaviors and relationships.
According to The Guardian's report on the filings, the states accuse OpenAI of coaching children to harm themselves — language that goes beyond deceptive-marketing claims and into the territory of product safety failures affecting a protected class of users.
The suits also allege that OpenAI collected data from minors and failed to do enough to keep underage users off the platform entirely, a persistent weak point for chatbots that ask users to self-report their age.
Wrongful-death cases form the backdrop
The state complaints lean heavily on a string of private lawsuits filed by family members of teens and adults alleging that ChatGPT played a role in their loved ones' deaths. Those cases, filed over the past year, have become the public face of the backlash against AI companion-style usage — and now state attorneys general are citing them as evidence of a pattern rather than isolated incidents.
Common Sense Media, the nonprofit that has led much of the research on children and AI, separately warned that ChatGPT's teen offering poses an "unacceptable risk," and Florida has moved to ban ChatGPT from acting like a person — regulatory signals that the states' new filings now echo in court.
Rogue AI hacking incidents enter the courtroom
In an unusual move, the lawsuits also cite recent rogue AI hacking incidents as evidence of OpenAI's alleged recklessness. The argument effectively treats OpenAI's security record — including agent-related incidents that have dominated the news cycle in recent weeks — as part of the same failure to prioritize safety that the states say endangered young users.
"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," Arizona's lawsuit states, according to The Verge.
A widening legal front for OpenAI
The eight-state action arrives as OpenAI is already defending private suits from bereaved families, facing subpoenas from state attorneys general, and contending with a shifting regulatory landscape in Washington. What distinguishes the new filings is scale and posture: rather than seeking damages for individual harms, state AGs are invoking consumer protection statutes to force changes to how ChatGPT is marketed, age-gated and designed for young users.
For OpenAI, the filings land at a delicate moment. The company has been courting enterprise customers and consumers with an aggressive product cadence while publicly insisting that safety reviews gate its releases. Eight states now formally allege the opposite — that the company's public safety claims were themselves the deception.
What happens next
Consumer protection cases brought by state attorneys general typically seek injunctions, fines, or consent decrees that mandate product changes — in this case, potentially stricter age verification, safety disclosures, or restrictions on how ChatGPT interacts with minors. Any remedies could ripple across the entire AI industry, since every major lab faces the same structural question: how to keep systems this capable away from users too young to evaluate them.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to the filings with a public statement at the time of reporting. The company has previously said it works to make its models safe for teens and has introduced parental controls, while acknowledging that its safeguards are imperfect under real-world usage.
The eight lawsuits guarantee that ChatGPT's safety record will now be litigated in state courts across the country — and that the question of who is responsible when an AI chatbot harms a child will be decided, at least in part, by judges rather than by press releases.
However the cases are resolved, they mark a shift in how American regulators are approaching AI consumer products: safety claims made in marketing materials are now being treated as legally testable statements, and the companies making them are being held to them. Every major AI lab shipping chatbots to a general audience — including minors who find ways around age gates — will be watching how these eight states fare.
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