Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman Over ChatGPT Safety

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit on Friday against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices—Consumer Protection Act, alleging the company misled the public by marketing ChatGPT as safe and dependable without implementing adequate guardrails. The complaint asserts that OpenAI abandoned its 2015 founding mission as a non-profit dedicated to the public good in order to pursue rapid commercial growth and high-valuation capital expansion, rushing its flagship chatbot to market without properly training the platform or disclosing inherent operational risks. State prosecutors allege that unmonitored ChatGPT deployments have generated inaccurate and harmful outputs, accusing the platform of aiding mass shooters, encouraging vulnerable users toward self-harm, eroding critical thinking skills, and collecting data from minors without parental oversight. The filing seeks court-ordered accountability and stricter state oversight of OpenAI and its executive leadership, with enforcement officials stating that AI developers remain bound by existing consumer protection laws to transparently disclose system limitations. "Because of Defendants’ misrepresentations about their artificial intelligence products and their careless introduction of ChatGPT to Texas and the world, mass shooters have been aided and abetted in deadly rampages, vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide, professionals have suffered public humiliation, users have lost critical thinking skills, and minors have become addicted to a tool that feigns human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight." — Texas Attorney General Lawsuit Filing