Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Sam Altman’s OpenAI on Friday, accusing the company of lying about risks it could pose to users.
Paxton filed the lawsuit in Collin County district court, claiming OpenAI violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by allegedly engaging in deception and harming users. The attorney general sought to blame OpenAI for how people use the platform to collect information on sensitive topics ranging from suicide to mass shootings.
The attorney general also blamed OpenAI for creating users he said have “lost critical thinking skills, and minors [who] have become addicted to a tool that fakes human compassion.”
The development could be designed as an appeal to voters skeptical of artificial intelligence, coming as Paxton is in the final throes of his tense race for U.S. Senate in Texas against Democrat James Talarico.
“This litany of harms is driven by the company’s insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes, despite knowing the dangers of ChatGPT,” Paxton’s office said.
The attorney general is seeking an injunction that would require the company to block minors from accessing its products, such as ChatGPT. Paxton also wants OpenAI to be required to secure third-party approval on any new models from a court-appointed third-party evaluator, and is asking the court to institute civil penalties of $10,000 per violation of Texas’ consumer protection law
Aside from alleging OpenAI misled consumers by marketing ChatGPT as safe, the lawsuit claimed the company disregarded internal safety warnings to rush its product to market, citing the episode over the summer in which hundreds of rogue OpenAI agents hacked into Hugging Face, among other incidents.
Paxton’s lawsuit follows a similar move by fellow red state Florida against Altman over the summer. A coalition of states, including Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Iowa, Kansas, West Virginia and Nebraska, also sued OpenAI last month, arguing that the company violated their states’ consumer protection laws and put children at risk.
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Paxton is now in the final weeks of his campaign against Talarico, as his opponent seeks to become the first Democrat elected statewide in Texas in decades.
Polls paint a razor-thin race in the Lone Star state, triggering a record flow of spending to keep the state red. A trail of leading Republican figures, including President Donald Trump, flooded the state in recent months to stump for Paxton, as GOP fears grow that Talarico could flip the seat.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
