Eight states sued OpenAI on Wednesday, accusing it of harming children and misleading people about how safe ChatGPT is. Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana each filed separately in their own state courts, a coordinated push first reported by Reuters.
The complaints lean on consumer protection law. They say OpenAI pitched ChatGPT as a "safe, youth-appropriate tool that puts safety first" while it was "dangerous to vulnerable users," and they point to wrongful death suits from families of teens and adults. The states also say OpenAI collected data from minors and didn't do enough to keep underage users off. Iowa and Nebraska go further and cite OpenAI's rogue agent incidents, including the Hugging Face hack, as evidence of recklessness.
Arizona's filing doesn't hold back: OpenAI, it says, "has devolved from its original mission as a public-first nonprofit that prioritized safety into a cautionary tale."
The states want civil penalties and an end to what they call deceptive safety claims. Some also want unlawfully collected data deleted, and Arkansas is asking the court to halt "testing of advanced AI models until adequate safeguards are implemented," according to Engadget.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told The Verge the company has "built industry-leading age-specific protections" into ChatGPT, pointing to parental controls and break reminders, and said it wants AI policies that "apply to the entire AI industry," not just one company.
— via The Verge