On Oct. 14 local time, the attorneys general of Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia each filed suit against OpenAI in their own state courts. Reuters called it the largest coordinated lawsuit by US states against an AI company to date.
Of the eight states, seven have Republican attorneys general; the exception is Arizona.
The claims rest on consumer protection law
The core allegation from the plaintiffs is that ChatGPT was designed to be deliberately agreeable to users and to keep them talking, a way of earning their trust. After that, they say, it reinforces users' delusions, gives dangerous medical advice, and even helps plan violence, including mass shootings. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird also accused it of encouraging users to harm themselves.
"OpenAI is hurting kids and they are lying to Iowans."
On the legal route, several states lead with state consumer protection statutes, with product liability in a secondary role: the company allegedly knew the product carried risks, shipped it anyway, and misled users about its safety. Some states also characterize ChatGPT's effect on residents' health as a public nuisance.
The relief sought falls into three groups: civil penalties and damages; an order requiring OpenAI to change how ChatGPT operates; and, according to Reuters, a court order barring OpenAI from developing models capable of self-improvement unless it can ensure those models are aligned with human values. That last demand is rare in a consumer-protection case.
OpenAI's response
When the Reuters report cited by ITHome was published, an OpenAI spokesperson had not yet responded to a request for comment. The response Platformer received was that the company has stayed focused on product safety, launched a teen version of ChatGPT with stronger safeguards and parental controls in August 2025, and says it has built "industry-leading" age-based protections. The company also said it is willing to work with the states on policies that apply across the whole industry rather than singling out one company.
The full text of the state complaints and the specific damages sought by each state have not been listed in public reporting so far.
Setting the Meta cases alongside
The playbook looks a lot like the round of state suits against Meta. In 2023, 42 attorneys general jointly sued Meta, alleging that Instagram and other products harmed teenagers' mental health. That track has run for years: a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties, and the judge added $567 million in August, for a total of $942 million; a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay a 20-year-old woman $6 million.
By comparison, OpenAI faces a few differences.
First, the suits arrived earlier. Florida sued OpenAI on its own in June, and British Columbia, Canada, sued in September over the Tumbler Ridge school shooting. A separate investigation led by New York and joined by 42 states is still under way. These eight states are simply the first batch to move.
Second, the room for defenses is different. Platformer's Casey Newton expects OpenAI may argue that ChatGPT's output is speech protected by the First Amendment, or that the victims were already in crisis before they used it. Meta leaned on Section 230, which shields platforms from liability for user content, but a generative model's answers are written by the model itself, so that shield may not apply. In 2021 the Ninth Circuit, in a case involving Snap, already ruled that product design features are not protected by Section 230.
Third, the timing. The suits land while OpenAI is preparing to go public, when regulatory and litigation risks would be itemized in its offering documents.
A split inside the Republican Party
The demand to ban the development of self-improving models carries a topic once discussed mainly in AI safety circles into state courts. Newton reads it as a sign that some Republican state officials are distancing themselves from the tech industry's accelerationist wing, and that the party is not unified on AI.
Two things to watch next: whether the states consolidate their cases or move them to federal court, and whether the New York-led 42-state investigation turns into a new round of lawsuits soon.
Sources: Reuters, Platformer, CocoLoop, ITHome. The list of plaintiff states, the relief sought and the Meta verdict amounts follow the reports above.