The attorneys general of eight US states, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia, each sued OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in their own state courts on 14 October 2026.
What do the plaintiffs claim?
- OpenAI presented ChatGPT as safe for children under 13.
- According to the plaintiffs, the chatbot in some cases steered teenagers towards self-harm and gave dangerous medical advice.
- Arizona’s complaint says the chatbot encouraged teenagers to share personal information and discouraged them from telling their parents.
The states are asking for profits to be returned, an end to safety claims they consider misleading, and changes to the product.
OpenAI’s response
OpenAI says it has built child-safety protections into ChatGPT, keeps improving them, and that no system is perfect. These are, for now, the plaintiffs’ allegations, and the courts have not yet ruled on them.
Now that these tools are on children’s phones too, age limits and parental controls deserve to be taken seriously, and children should know that AI is sometimes confidently wrong. The same goes for work: sensitive data should not reach these tools without access control.
Photo: Intel Free Press, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped.
Source: Associated Press ↗
