Iowa, Nebraska And Six Other States Are Suing OpenAI For Endangering Children

In a coordinated effort, eight states have filed lawsuits against OpenAI alleging the company has violated state-level consumer protection laws and endangered children. As Reuters first reported, Attorneys General from Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana each filed in their respective state courts, but with the shared goals of changing how OpenAI develops its models and advertises their capabilities, and forcing the company to pay for the harm it’s allegedly caused.

The lawsuits claim OpenAI is misleading customers about the safety of its AI products, not just in their capacity to provide incorrect information or potentially enable users to harm themselves and others, but also because AI agents themselves are capable of breaking the law. For example, both Iowa and Nebraska cite OpenAI’s now multiple instances of rogue agent behavior, including the Hugging Face hack. They also point to instances of ChatGPT allegedly enabling a teen’s death by suicide and the chatbot providing incorrect medical information that led to a user’s overdose, incidents that have also led to separate wrongful death suits against the company. Some states also take issue with OpenAI retaining data from underage users.

Engadget has asked OpenAI to comment on the state lawsuits. We’ll update this article if we hear back.

The desired remedies for OpenAI’s behavior vary from state to state due to the patchwork nature of consumer protection and child protection laws in the US. Outside of financial penalties, the states want OpenAI to clearly disclose the risks of its products, stop practices the states consider deceptive and comply with existing laws. Some states, like Arkansas, are also asking the court to halt “testing of advanced AI models until adequate safeguards are implemented.”

OpenAI has rolled out a series of parental controls and child protection features to try to address some of the most immediate risks posed by its chatbot. It also backed the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that, if made law, could introduce several mandatory design changes to the company’s products. The company’s efforts to address the potential for its AI to break rules and “escape containment” have been harder to pin down, though. OpenAI announced it would slow the development of its frontier models in August to ensure their safety and the company signed on to a voluntary safety pact with other AI companies organized by the White House in September. It’s not clear if either of these changes have actually made the company’s AI development process safer.