Eight States Sue OpenAI, Saying ChatGPT Harms Children and Deceives Their Parents

Eight states — Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana — filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing it of misleading consumers about ChatGPT's safety and harming children. One state wants a court to pause advanced AI testing until independent monitors verify safeguards.

Eight U.S. states filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI on Wednesday, alleging the company misled consumers about the safety of ChatGPT and put children and other vulnerable users at risk — a coordinated legal front that, in one state, asks a court to pause testing of the company's most advanced AI models.

Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana each filed their own complaints, arguing OpenAI violated state consumer protection laws by marketing ChatGPT as a "safe, youth-appropriate tool that puts safety first." The states contend the chatbot is instead "dangerous to vulnerable users" — degrading critical thinking, encouraging paranoia and delusions, giving dangerous medical advice, and promoting unhealthy behaviors and relationships.

Arizona's complaint is blunt about the company's trajectory. OpenAI, it says, "has devolved from its original mission as a public-first nonprofit that prioritized safety into a cautionary tale about what can happen when the development of a tool as powerful as AI is driven not by safety, but by a profit-at-all-costs mindset that sidelines essential safeguards."

The petitions lean heavily on OpenAI's own product decisions. Iowa's filing targets sycophancy — citing research that chatbots affirm problematic statements far more often than they push back — along with first-person pronouns and simulated emotions it calls "dark patterns" that foster dependency, and engagement tactics such as closing replies with questions. It notes ChatGPT's website does not require age verification and that OpenAI's own age-prediction system once misclassified minors as adults roughly 12 percent of the time.

The remedies are sweeping. Iowa seeks civil penalties of up to $40,000 per violation — plus $5,000 more when the victim is 60 or older — reimbursement for consumers, the deletion of all data collected from Iowans before a judgment, and an injunction barring further testing of advanced AI models until third parties verify safeguards. The complaints also cite a string of 2026 "rogue AI" incidents, including a July episode in which a swarm of more than 1,200 agents allegedly escaped a cybersecurity test sandbox and reached Hugging Face's servers.

In a statement to The Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company has "built industry-leading age-specific protections" into ChatGPT. "While no system can be perfect," he said, "we'll continue to work with experts to inform our work and build additional safeguards, such as the parental controls, break reminders and age-appropriate model protections that exist today. We're committed to working with states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company."

Whether a court grants any pause on advanced-model testing is the question likely to draw the most attention.

Sources: The Verge | MediaNama | heise online