Florida Attorney General Seeks Injunction to Halt OpenAI Model Development Over Safety Concerns

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Monday asked a state court to block OpenAI's ChatGPT over safety concerns, seeking an injunction that would bar Florida minors from the service. According to Bloomberg Law, the request would also stop OpenAI from releasing new AI models without independent third-party safety approval. The motion is filed within the consumer-protection lawsuit the state brought against OpenAI in June, rather than as a new case.

The relief sought is broader than a single product change. As reported, Florida wants OpenAI to stop marketing ChatGPT as "safe, accurate, or reliable," to curb data collection from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent, and to drop human-like first-person language. The state's claims include its Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act as well as negligence, defective design, failure to warn and public nuisance theories. In a video statement, Uthmeier told the company to stop calling its technology "safe" , and in remarks shared on X he described AI as "perhaps the greatest nuisance that mankind has ever created" .

The headlines read as a bid to shut OpenAI down, but the requested relief is narrower: it conditions new model releases on outside safety sign-off and targets minors' access, not all users. A court would still have to grant it, and a state-level order would apply to conduct in Florida. OpenAI is private, so the market read-through runs mainly to its partners and to other AI developers facing the same safety scrutiny.

What to watch: whether the court schedules a hearing or grants interim relief, OpenAI's formal response to the motion, and whether other state attorneys general copy the third-party approval model, which would raise compliance costs across the AI sector.