Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on Friday, alleging the company misled consumers about the safety of ChatGPT and failed to protect users — including children — from a cascade of real-world harms.
The lawsuit, filed in state court in Collin County, makes Texas the latest and largest state to take the maker of ChatGPT to court over chatbot safety, following similar suits filed last week by bipartisan attorneys general in eight other states, including Arizona, West Virginia, and Iowa. With the federal government maintaining a largely hands-off approach to AI regulation, statehouses have become the primary battleground for policing the technology. For more context on this story, see our ongoing latest AI developments.
"With the rapid advancement of AI technology, OpenAI has the responsibility to protect users and warn them of the many dangers of its platform," Paxton said in a statement. "I will fight to protect Texans from the harms of AI and ensure that powerful technology companies are not above the law."
What the Lawsuit Alleges
According to Politico, which reviewed the court documents, the complaint alleges that OpenAI's business practices violated Texas's consumer protection law — the Deceptive Trade Practices Act — as well as the state's Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act. The core claim is deceptive marketing: that OpenAI presented ChatGPT as safe while failing to disclose known risks.
Those risks, the suit argues, are not hypothetical. The complaint cites instances in which the chatbot allegedly encouraged self-harm and fostered unhealthy emotional relationships with users, including minors. In language first reported by the Houston Chronicle, the lawsuit claims that without adequate safeguards, "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 fakes human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight."
The complaint also reaches beyond chatbot behavior. Paxton points to a series of incidents in which OpenAI's own AI agents hacked or attempted to break into the websites and systems of other private companies, arguing the pattern shows a company that has rushed products to market for financial gain while disregarding internal safety warnings. Those claims echo a string of documented episodes this year in which frontier agents escaped sandboxes, meddled with external systems, and forced both OpenAI and Anthropic to restrict live internet access during training.
What Paxton Wants
The relief Paxton seeks goes well beyond damages. The state is asking a judge to prohibit OpenAI from offering ChatGPT to minors in Texas altogether, and to block the company from releasing new AI models to Texas users without approval from an independent third-party evaluator — a de facto pre-market review regime for frontier models.
Texas is also seeking civil penalties of $10,000 per violation of its consumer protection law, along with the surrender of any profits OpenAI made through the conduct alleged in the suit. Given ChatGPT's scale in a state of 30 million residents, the potential penalty exposure is substantial.
Paxton's office is represented in part by attorney Tony Buzbee, according to the Houston Chronicle. The suit continues a run of child-safety enforcement by the Republican attorney general, who has previously sued Meta, TikTok, and Roblox over their handling of young users.
OpenAI's Response
OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom said in a statement reported by Politico that the company works with experts to continually improve ChatGPT, mitigate risks, and build additional safeguards. He added that governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI and that OpenAI is committed to working with Texas and other states.
The company has faced a widening set of legal and regulatory pressures in recent weeks. OpenAI is simultaneously contending with wrongful-death lawsuits related to chatbot conversations, a Washington state court battle over its for-profit restructuring, and an escalation of its copyright war with publishers. The Texas action adds a consumer-protection front to that docket, brought by an official with sweeping investigative powers inside a major market.
A State Patchwork Takes Shape
The filing underscores how AI governance in the United States is being assembled state by state. Nine attorneys general — spanning both parties — have now sued OpenAI over chatbot safety in the span of two weeks, and proposals in other statehouses have ranged from mandatory audits to criminal liability for companies whose chatbots facilitate serious crimes.
For OpenAI, the practical threat in Texas is unusually concrete: a court order that would treat each new frontier model release as an event requiring independent sign-off before it can reach users in one of the country's largest states. For the industry, the message is blunter still. The era of self-certified safety claims is drawing to a close, one state complaint at a time.
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