The lawsuits cover everything from ChatGPT’s design to the company’s recent problems with rogue agents.
In a coordinated effort, eight states filed lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging the company violated state-level consumer protection laws and child endangerment. How Reuters first reported, attorney general from Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana all filed in their respective state courts, but with the common goals of changing how OpenAI develops its models and advertising its capabilities, and forcing the company to pay for the damage it allegedly caused.
The lawsuits allege that OpenAI misleads customers about the safety of its AI products, not only in their capacity to provide false information or allow potential users to harm themselves and others, but also because AI agents themselves are capable of breaking the law. For example, both Iowa and Nebraska cite OpenAI’s now multiple instances of rogue agent behavior, including the Hugging Face hack. They also point to cases of ChatGPT that allegedly enabled the death of a teenager by suicide and the chatbot providing false medical information that led to an overdose of the user, incidents that also led to separate wrongful death lawsuits against the company. Some states also take issue with OpenAI for retaining data from underage users.
Engadget has asked OpenAI to comment on the state’s lawsuits. We’ll update this article when we hear back.
The desired remedies for OpenAI’s conduct vary from state to state due to the patchwork nature of consumer protection and child protection laws in the United States. Apart from financial penalties, the states want OpenAI to clearly disclose the risks of its products, stop practices that the states consider deceptive and comply with existing laws. Some states, such as Arkansas, are also asking the court to “stop testing of advanced AI models until adequate safeguards are implemented.”
OpenAI has rolled out a series of parental controls and child protection features to try to address some of the most immediate risks posed by its chatbot. It also supported the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that, if passed into law, could introduce several mandatory design changes to the company’s products. The company’s efforts to address the potential for its AI to break rules and “evade kidnapping” have been harder to pin down, however. OpenAI announced that it would slow down the development of its frontier models in August to ensure their security and the company signed a voluntary security pact with other AI companies organized by the White House in September. It’s unclear whether any of these changes actually made the company’s AI development process more secure.